Page 1643 - Week 05 - Thursday, 8 May 2008
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University, rebuking the Chief Minister’s shoddy accounting. In his article, Professor Barton made it clear that superannuation assets should not be included in the operating result, saying that “capital gains and losses should not be included in the measure of the net operating balance of the budget because they do not result from transactions and do not provide a means of funding recurrent expenditure”.
The inclusion of employee superannuation assets in calculating one’s bottom line is a practice that is less than honest and it certainly would not be acceptable if it was undertaken by any commercial organisation anywhere in this country. I know the Chief Minister’s response will be: “Well, it is there. You can see it. You’ve picked up the figures. We’re not hiding anything.” But, of course, the spin that is put on everything does not respect that particular economic concept. It is standard operating procedure for the ACT Chief Minister, and, unfortunately, much of the ACT media—dare I say, all of the ACT media—have uncritically accepted the government’s assertion of a surplus. I still have not even heard this mentioned this year by the opposition leader or the shadow treasurer, so I am assuming that they have accepted it without question.
The inclusion of gains in superannuation assets in the budget bottom line is especially problematic, given that there is no corresponding inclusion of the increasing liabilities for superannuation payments that they are set aside to fund. By the end of the current financial year, the government projects that it will have a shortfall of $1.1 billion in unfunded superannuation liability. Moreover, in the last year we have seen that the goal of fully funding all superannuation liabilities by 2030 has proceeded behind the schedule budgeted in the 2007-08 budget. The budgeted projections in the 2007-08 budget were that by the end of this financial year it would be at 67 per cent funding. In fact, the government is now only at 65 per cent funding. With the revised estimates, the government is not now anticipating reaching the 67 per cent funding level until the end of the 2011-12 financial year, four years late.
This is the real state of the ACT budget, despite the government’s assurances that it is a budget for the future. The headline of the Canberra Times on Wednesday perfectly captured not only the essence of this budget but the essence of the Stanhope government philosophy throughout its two terms in government. As I said at the introduction of my remarks, that headline read, in bold text, “Spend Spend Spend”. To that description I would add only one major additional diagnosis—tax, tax, tax!
While there are some allocations in this budget of which I approve, I am left somewhat disappointed by yet another budget in which an opportunity for tax reform, a plea which is heard in all quarters of this territory, has been sacrificed on the altar of big government expansion and election year opportunism.
There are initiatives that I have complimented. I am pleased to see some of the work that is being done on the duplication and widening of a number of existing roads in the vicinity of the airport. I have received a number of complaints from individuals who lament the fact that getting to catch flights has now become an exercise in guesswork because of the hopeless state of roads to and from Canberra airport and the enormous difficulty that people who have business interstate encounter in trying to make their flights in time.
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