Page 895 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 24 February 2009
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is having difficulty placing 60 apprentices looking for work—the government is acting to provide confidence in the areas of emerging capacity such as the building and construction industry. Some of our discussions and consultation with industry have revealed that smaller construction firms and subcontractors are expected to experience emergent capacity in 2009. That is why we are targeting this local package. It is to assist in utilising that capacity to ensure a pipeline of activity over the next few years and provide confidence to employers to retain their workforce, and to help support local jobs and economic activity.
When people see the package on Thursday—and I am hopeful that the Assembly will support that package—when they look at the purpose behind it, the reasons behind it and the target of it, it will be very hard to object to supporting it.
The challenge for this government, and certainly for me as a new Treasurer to this portfolio, is to work through the impacts on our underlying budget position; that is, to look at how we need to respond now, but also over the next few budgets, to the community to indicate the path back to a surplus operating position over the medium term. This will take time and it will not be achieved in one budget year. However, we will be taking into consideration our local economic indicators, the need to maintain high quality services, to deliver on commitments we have made to the people of Canberra and to deliver on our infrastructure that we proposed in last year’s budget.
I was interested to hear Mr Hanson’s, I guess, argument that we have been reckless spenders and that we have wasted the rivers of gold that have come to us. I guess my response to that would be that you can isolate those projects that you have isolated, but the majority of recurrent expenditure by far, in terms of impact on our bottom line, has gone into core areas of government service delivery, and no amount of trawling through the budget papers of the last four years will deny that: health, education, child protection, disability—increases in support for the community sector.
If you want to translate that as wasting revenue to government, try and do that, but I would also challenge you then to say what part of those you would have not done. What part of the child protection system would you have not responded to? What part of the health system would you have not grown? Would you not have funded more elective surgery? Would you not have funded extra cancer specialists? These are the pressures that governments have to respond to year by year. As our city grows, as our demographic needs change, we have to respond to that. And no government can not spend on those core areas of government service delivery and maintain the high quality services that we have.
Mr Hanson made a bit about election promises and what was done. Our election promises over the forward estimates, I think, on average were between about $35 million and $38 million a year. Our spending promises through the campaign did not exceed that. In fact, the document you tabled says:
ACT Labor has given its word that the election promises it makes will be fully funded and will allow the ACT to maintain surpluses in each of the years ...
That is the text. So read into it that our election promises that we make will be fully funded and will allow the ACT budget to remain in surplus.
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