Page 141 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 9 December 2008
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MR SMYTH: “Now it’s urgent, now we want to do it, five weeks later.” It is hardly a real measure of urgency. I see no reason why the Assembly could not have sat a week earlier than it did, in the first week of December or the last week of November. We could have had two sitting weeks. But they are not interested in the work and they use urgency as an excuse. If we had sat last week, or indeed the week before, that would have provided more than enough time to give relevant scrutiny to this bill. Unfortunately, what we are seeing once again is the government in lazy mode.
Appropriation bills are very straightforward to draft. Indeed, if it was a bill to implement government promises, they would already have the detail of the promises and they would have the costings from Treasury. All you would have had to do was to put it together in the bill. It would not have been hard to have the bill prepared weeks and weeks ago, so there is no excuse for delaying consideration by the Assembly and so that it can be finalised before Christmas.
The bill proposes an additional $16.2 million in spending in 2008-09 and around $4 million in the outyears after that. That is an additional $16 million, and that is $10 million more than the Labor Party promised during the campaign. So what has happened there? As I have already said, we missed a number of key things. I would have thought mortgage relief was urgent but apparently it is not. Then there are the Treasurer’s comments about an apparent commitment to increased accountability and transparency. Some of this takes the form of additional funding for the executive. What I found out in the briefing today, but I have not had time to share it with my colleagues, and the larger world won’t know, is that that equates to basically $70,000 a year extra for each of the minister’s offices. It is called “increased funding for accountability and transparency”. Why don’t you just call it what it is—“increased staff allowance”? Why try to hide it? It is an increased staff allowance; call it what it is. I think that alone should set alarm bells ringing in people’s minds. They could ask, “Why are they calling these things by these titles when what they should say is what they are?” Indeed, as the minister said, there is money there for the crossbench and the opposition as well, and we welcome that. But let us put it down to exactly what it is. There is money in the bill to improve staffing for the committees. That is a good thing, too, but let us call it what it is.
In terms of whether this is a global financial response, a crisis response, it is miniscule at best and very poorly thought out: half a million dollars in new capital for the arboretum, $1.3 million for cycling, $881,000 for regional hubs, $451,000 for the Mitchell Customer Service Centre, $1.6 million, as I said, for business improvement in education. If that is all the government can come up with, I am quite surprised. As a stimulation package, I think it is more of a damp squib, and perhaps a stunt with little substance.
I think we have to then consider the overall impact of this bill. Based on the pre-election update, if you look at it, this would drop the surplus to something like $50 million this year; in 2009-10 to something like $10 million; in 2010-11 to $11 million; and in 2011-12 to $13 million. That alone is worth scrutiny to find out what the implications are and whether it is justified. Clearly, just from that, the prospects for the ACT budget surpluses are weaker, and that needs to be scrutinised.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .