Page 1932 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 May 2009
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decade of deficits is unsustainable; deficits are unsustainable. To actually have a Treasurer predicting, as she has done over the last couple of weeks, that we will have seven years of deficit, seven years in which to recover, is an indictment of the Treasurer. When we link that with the failure of the reforms that were implemented in 2006, we have a recipe for disaster.
The prospects for the ACT are, as the Treasurer herself has said, seven years of deficits, we believe leading to a decade of deficits. This is despite the reforms announced in 2006, which I think indicates quite clearly that the reforms were ill-founded and unachieved.
There can be no question that remedial action is required to ensure that these outcomes should occur, but what we find out is that they were not realised. There is no evidence of budget savings being achieved. With every request of the then Treasurer, Mr Stanhope, to point to them, he simply says, “Look at it; it is in the budget.” He cannot detail where these reforms were effective; he cannot detail the savings.
Out of the reforms of 2006, where we have no sense of savings having been achieved, we also have all the angst of the Costello report. This is where we move on in the evolution of the ACT economy. We have a report that is secret; we have a report that purports to be the basis for economic reform—we now know that those economic reforms have failed—and we have a report that purports to show the way forward, and indeed that was the basis of the 2006 budget.
We do not know what is in that report; we only had the Chief Minister’s word for it. If this report is as decisive as the Chief Minister portrays, and if this report is effective and to be believed, then it would be appropriate for that report to be available to all of us here today. Mr Speaker, we know that the government have sat on the report and will continue to sit on the report because they know at heart that the report is flawed. We know it was flawed in the way they went about school closures. We know it was flawed in the way they went about slashing the tourism budget. We know it was flawed in the way they went about slashing business programs. The list just goes on and on and on. The government’s failure to table that report, to clear the air, can only lead to lingering doubt. That is the problem for this government: there is always lingering doubt.
There is the importance of the handling of the Costello report—developed in secrecy, kept in secrecy. Potentially parts of it might be reasonable, given some cabinet deliberation, but it does not stop the report itself being released. It remains a secret document. That means that the information that was collected, the analysis that was undertaken and the conclusions that were reached cannot be tested by the Canberra community. Isn’t that a different approach from what we heard at breakfast this morning? The Treasurer now wants to take time talking to the community?
The problem with having the Costello report still secret is that we do not know where we got to and why. The Costello report should be released as an indication of the Stanhope-Gallagher government’s desire to be open and accountable, and it should be released as an indication of a government being responsible for its decisions—and, indeed, the information that it took these decisions upon.
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