Page 1230 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 24 March 2009
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But, getting beyond that, apparently they have made all sorts of savings. And what Katy Gallagher has said is that the efficiencies have gone as far as they can; therefore, any further efficiencies are bad and any further efficiencies put forward by the opposition will lead to job cuts. We heard ridiculous claims. Remember that we heard from the Chief Minister that it was going to kill Christmas, it was going to kill Kenny Koala and the kangaroos would run wild. The claims were outlandish.
Of course, we should take a moment to reflect, though, on the credibility of what this government has said on economics. Remember we had the “It’s a fact” document. It was apparently produced by Treasury but I would not assign blame for that document to Treasury. I put the blame for that document on Jon Stanhope and his office. There is no doubt that they gave the wrong information to Treasury.
I think Treasury does a reasonable job; it does a fairly good job on modelling and on being able to count. Clearly, the same cannot be said of the former Treasurer, who came out with a document that claimed the election commitments would put us into the red by hundreds of millions of dollars and Jon Stanhope was going to keep us in surplus. But, of course, we know it is a promise he never intended to keep, and one of the reasons for that is that they simply cannot keep control over spending.
One of the things that the Treasurer is going to have to do when she delivers this budget—apart from blaming everyone else—is: when we get to the point of which bits she actually controls, which bits this government actually controls, she is going to have say why it is not important to cut advertising in the LDA so that you can target spending in education or in health. She will have to explain why Actew’s spending should not be looked at and why certain parts of the Chief Minister’s Department, particularly central agency functions, need to be growing as fast as they are in the outyears at the expense of other more important priorities or at the expense, indeed, of a far bigger budget deficit. These are the things that this Treasurer will have to explain. She will have to explain why some of these basic savings could not be made.
We can go through the millions for public artwork. We can look at some of the budget blow-outs, with the way that capital works have been treated. Indeed, looking more broadly than even the budget, we can look at economic management. We can look, for instance, at planning and how much is delayed in the system currently as a result of a dysfunctional planning system. That not only leads to less economic activity but, of course, it then leads to less revenue coming to government over time because there is not the economic activity to underpin it, and so fewer taxes will actually be collected because they are stifling activity. These are the questions that the Treasurer will have to answer. She is not going to be able to hide behind global circumstances and commonwealth spending.
We know that there are challenges out there. But people elect members of the ACT parliament to act in the best interests of all Canberrans and not to look for excuses as to what they cannot do and why they are responsible for absolutely nothing.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Convenor, ACT Greens) (4.06): The ACT Greens consider the ACT government has a significant part to play in making
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