Page 1941 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 May 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Ms Gallagher: Read your budget papers.
MRS DUNNE: Why do we have a Treasurer who can produce a budget paper that says, despite all the things that she said about the underlying strength of the economy, we must be in deficit for this length of time? Of course, we are all running away as usual because the Treasurer is in a situation where she cannot defend the indefensible.
What is indefensible is the fact that by her own admission we will be in deficit in the ACT for the next seven years. She is happy to defend that record. She is proud of that record. She is proud of the budget. She said it herself in her speech today. Her presentation was that she is proud of this budget and the underlying message is that in the next four years we are going to be in excess of $700 million in deficit and that will extend out beyond the outyears for another three years. This is not something that a Treasurer in any jurisdiction should be proud of or could be proud of.
We have a very schizophrenic approach from the Treasurer to the state of the economy in the ACT and the state of the budget in the ACT. The whole problem with the state of this budget is that we are putting things off in a sort of Scarlett O’Hara approach: tomorrow is another day; next year’s budget is another budget; that is when we will take the hard decisions.
What we have seen today—somebody said this to me after the budget breakfast this morning—is a holding-back-the-dam budget. There is Katy with her hands against the dam wall saying, “If I could just hang on for a little while.” But her strength will subside, her strength will sap and the dam wall will break. It will break by her reckoning next year. We will see a repeat of the horror budget that we saw in 2006.
The only bright prospect of that happening is that if there is some public discussion about how we should apply the razor to the ACT economy, the decisions that will be made will not be the secretive decisions like the decisions that were made in 2006.
Mr Seselja: They will still be secretive.
MRS DUNNE: We can live in hope, Mr Seselja. But let us reflect back on the 2006 budget. The 2006 budget was designed to drought-proof us, so to speak. The Treasurer at the time kept using these expressions. We were told that it was to get us into a situation where we would never have to have another horror budget again. But we are going to have to have one next year, by the Treasurer’s own admission.
The reasoning, the underpinning for all of those decisions—the closure of 23 schools, the creation of shared services, the raft of changes that were made, the cutbacks, the job losses, all of these things—is still hidden. No, the opposition will not give up on obtaining the Strategic and functional review of the ACT public sector and services because this is a pivotal document. It goes to the character of the government who will make substantial and far-reaching policy changes but is not prepared to substantiate the reasons for them.
In my experience, being through that time as the shadow minister for education and through the close association that I have had with the school communities that were
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .