Page 2096 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 May 2009
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There is no plan to accept responsibility. In the six months since the election we have seen a government paralysed by inactivity in the face of significant challenges. Government sitting days have finished early because the government has no business. It clearly has no agenda. It has no plan. At a time when Canberrans expect that their elected representatives will drive policy solutions to the economic challenges we face, we see a government at a loss for answers, as encapsulated in this budget.
This budget is not a seven-year plan for recovery. It is the cost we have to pay for Jon Stanhope keeping his job. It is the price for ducking decisions. It is the cost of a Treasurer deciding to put off the pain to avoid the blame. As Michael Moore said, it is the blame-everyone-but-me budget. At the end of that, we are faced with these inescapable facts: we will be $770 million in deficit and will be in deficit for at least seven more years; we are in recession, the first Australian jurisdiction to be so, and we have skirted being so for a year and a half.
There is no actual plan in this budget. It is a fingers-crossed budget from a guesswork Treasurer, a hope-for-the-best budget and in many ways a pay-the-piper budget. But it is not Jon Stanhope or Katy Gallagher who has to pay; it is we, the community. It is we that now have to pay for their poor choices in the past. It is we who have to face a decade of deficits for the government’s refusal to make cuts during an election year. It is we that will pay for the deceit of political ruthlessness. It is we that will hold you accountable for your choices.
The global financial crisis is one of the facts but not the only one. We have seen in recent weeks any number of attempts to blur facts, recast history, wriggle out of commitments. Enough! With a deficit of the size announced, the territory in recession and the longest stretch of red ink in our history, we say enough—enough distractions, enough excuses, enough buck-passing. It is time for the government to accept the results of its own making.
This is a budget with no plan to do things differently. We have put a complete, comprehensive plan for an alternative vision to the people of Canberra. The Labor government is well aware of exactly what those plans are. We know this because they have spent the last six months copying the best bits and pretending they are theirs—GDE, class sizes, planning—all ours, all copied by this government.
We put a complete list of savings that we would undertake to bring the budget into line with our priorities. We know they are fully aware of our Treasury-costed savings because they claimed that every saving we found was too much and unnecessary. The fact is that there is an alternative vision, a vision that we continue to develop.
It must be said, on the issue of savings—and we heard again from the Chief Minister today—he criticises our savings and then he says, “You need to find more savings.” In fact, we had Katy Gallagher, in a press release yesterday, saying that she looked forward to us giving her ideas on savings. We will and we will continue to do so. But this government cannot have it both ways. They cannot say, on the one hand, “No, your savings are too harsh, too deep; they will cost jobs.” And that was not backed up by any of the analysis but they say that. On the other hand, now they say, “No, you do not have enough.” You cannot have it both ways.
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