Page 1641 - Week 05 - Thursday, 8 May 2008
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government does not have a great track record in relation to managing major infrastructure programs.
Budget blow-outs should not be accepted as a matter of course with major infrastructure programs. Of course sometimes there might be external factors, but a lot of the responsibility for this must come down to management issues. We have been told that the Shared Services Centre will do much to improve the capacity of the territory to oversee procurement and the like and that there was a lot less expertise under the previous arrangements. Time will tell whether this is the case, and we hope that, in fact, there can be improvements in the ability to budget for these projects.
I do not necessarily worry about the government’s ability to attract the necessary people to work on infrastructure programs. This has been something of a theme in the media since the budget was handed down and since the Treasurer and Chief Minister announced the theme of his budget this year. I am sure that lucrative government contracts will attract a lot of tradespeople and contractors.
However, I do worry about the flow-on impacts such as when ordinary people, looking to build a home or undertake renovations, find it much harder to find skilled tradespeople. This is already a significant issue, I am told, by people in those areas of business activity. This could become a bigger issue with new developments that are planned for parts of Canberra.
Just as we see in the more mainstream employment where the commonwealth poaches people out of the ACT and the ACT increases remuneration, which makes it harder for small business in Canberra to retain staff, the same principles can apply with public sector expenditure on infrastructure and the competitive challenge that presents for the small private developer and investor.
We will obviously have more in-depth discussions about these issues in the coming weeks, but I highlight them in this speech to acknowledge that this budget does produce some worthwhile expenditure. I do not believe in opposing something just for the sake of it.
There are some new expenditure initiatives in the budget to core services that I do support. However, there are significant shortcomings in this budget that is ultimately a missed opportunity to provide tax relief.
In addition to the wasteful areas that I have already highlighted, I am extremely concerned about the continued increase in staffing levels in the ACT public service. Staffing levels continue to increase in the ACT government, with a blow-out in the number of staff employed this year compared to what was budgeted. In the 2007-08 budget, the government budgeted for an increase of 149 full-time equivalent staff. The estimated outcome was an increase of 390 full-time equivalent staff, more than double the budgeted increase.
This is an overall increase of 2.58 per cent in the level of full-time equivalent staff in the ACT government, an increase which is substantially above population growth. This means that a higher proportion of ACT residents will be employed in the ACT bureaucracy instead of being employed in more productive taxpaying enterprises.
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