Page 1595 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 31 March 2009
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At the end of the day, the money has to come from somewhere and, while you try to keep taxes at a reasonable level and while you look at all your areas of expenditure and you look for savings and you look to make sure your expenditure is efficient, our community demands high-quality public services. They demand it in health; they demand it in education; they demand it in child protection; they demand it in disability services; they demand it in the look of the city; they demand it in the amenity that they want in their own suburb. These are things that the Canberra community have said they want to see and, in order to deliver that to the community, the government has to raise the money.
The piece that is missing from the opposition’s analysis is that the revenue base is too narrow and taxes are too high. Then they come in this place and argue for greater expenditure on a whole range of areas that they are interested in, and you just cannot have that debate without having the other. You cannot have the debate of how you increase services, address needs in the community, and not have the discussion on revenue raising and how you look at that.
From memory, although they argued a lot about all of the revenue measures in our 2006-07 budget, at the end of the day I do not think they voted to oppose any.
Mr Smyth: We voted against all of them.
MS GALLAGHER: You voted against all of them?
Mr Smyth: Yes, voted against the utilities levy, voted against the fire and emergency services levy.
MS GALLAGHER: You vote against the money that is being well spent now in health, education, child protection, disability. That is where it goes. Take a look at the budget. Take a look at where the increases in appropriations have gone to. They have gone to key areas of service delivery. The government will keep taking those decisions, mindful of the fact that we do not want to tax the community to a level that is unreasonable. But at the moment the level is not unreasonable. The expectations are very high. I think the challenge is to keep that balance together, and that is what we are seeking to do. (Time expired.)
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Convenor, ACT Greens) (3.37): I was a little surprised by the content of this MPI. I was hoping to hear more around how we might diversify the income and also broaden our revenue base, but that is not what I heard here this afternoon. There was a considerable amount of time spent talking about the statements of a Treasurer from more than four years ago. Then there was a focus on three areas that we do get our income from—taxation and money from the commonwealth through things such as GST and conveyancing. There was a lot of analysing in a very negative way, but there were not the sorts of things that I would have liked to have seen put on the table this afternoon—ways forward, solutions, new ideas. That is what I am very much interested in—those new ideas and those new approaches that we can take.
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