Page 1948 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 May 2009
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is worth just briefly responding to some of the comments from Ms Hunter before I address the substantive motion. I find it interesting that the Greens are so closely tying themselves to this budget in their public commentary. We do not know what the process was in terms of when they started to get the information about what was in the budget and which bits they ticked off on ahead of time other than what is in the agreement. But they are very much endorsing this budget very early on in the piece, and that is an interesting political strategy.
There are outstanding questions remaining on this, and this budget does not answer any of those. Those questions go to how much aspects of the Greens-Labor agreement will cost. We still have not heard the answer on that. On Sunday and Monday the issue arose about the cost of the public housing commitment, and we heard that Treasury has costed it at $940 million over three years. That is how much Treasury says it will cost if it was done over three years. The twofold response from both the government and the Greens was: “Well, it is aspirational. It is not meant to be delivered in the next three years”—okay—“That doesn’t take account of the federal government money.” Federal government money is roughly $100 million so that makes it $840 million. We were told that the federal government money was meant to be new money, but, putting that aside, if we discount it, that is $840 million left. For every year that it is not implemented it actually increases. The cost of this promise increases quite a bit, because it is 10 per cent of all the new housing stock that comes online. If you want 10 per cent in 2020, that is going to a lot more than 10 per cent in 2010. That is the answer.
The questions that both the Labor Party and the Greens are going to have to answer on this are: how much will it cost, when will they start to deliver it, what will be the time frame for that delivery or did they really not mean it? There are only two possible scenarios: either there is a plan to deliver it—and it will get more expensive the longer it is left, so we will start to see the need for significant funding for that going forward—or, regardless of whether it was the Labor Party or the Greens, they never actually meant the biggest spending, biggest ticket policy item. They are outstanding questions that will need to be answered, and we have not heard the answers yet. We have had only silence on that issue from both the Labor Party and the Greens. That is not an issue that is dead, I am sure.
The issue here in terms of this budget is that we have seen the drop in revenue as a result of global downturn. We have seen it in terms of GST; we have seen it in some senses in terms of property, although not as dramatically; we have seen it in other areas in terms of things like interest earned on the money the government has in the bank. But when we look to the outyears, Treasury tells us in this budget that revenue will be back. The downturn in revenue is actually propped up, although in a tied manner, by federal government spending. There is federal government money coming in, and where there has been a loss of revenue, that is tied to particular projects. There is a little bit of that balancing.
Putting that aside, talking about the short-term hit, the Treasury is telling us in this document, in the budget, that in the outyears we will see $3.8 billion of revenue in 2012-13. That is not a drop in revenue; that is a significant increase in revenue in real terms, or by any measure. If you look at when the Stanhope government came to
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