Page 2119 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 May 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
tackling the global financial crisis in the last two days. In the last two days the Liberal Party started to think about the fact that the world is in crisis—the worst crisis since the Great Depression of the thirties.
That may be why the speech that the Leader of the Opposition delivered earlier today sounded, in fact, just like two days worth of work, rather than the six months of work that one would have expected the Liberal Party to have been doing. Perhaps if the opposition really had started work six months ago instead of two days ago, Mr Seselja would not have embarrassed himself to the extent that he has today. Perhaps he would have had the level of understanding that would have allowed him to inject a modicum of reality into his response to the Treasurer’s budget—a budget that commentators agree is a budget for these times.
The ACT budget handed down this week is not the only possible budget in such times as these, but it is the budget that I believe Canberrans need and want and will support. It does not do what the Liberals want to do—put a few hundred public servants immediately on the scrapheap in the midst of the worst economic downturn anyone now of working age in this country or anyone sitting in this Assembly has ever experienced. Sack now, strategise later. That is the Liberal vision: sack now. I know the public servants in the agencies that I have the privilege of being involved in are grateful that Labor proposes a different approach—a year-long consultation so that we can make the savings where they will cause the least pain to workers, but also to those on the receiving end, those who depend upon government services.
Let us be under no illusion. What we are witnessing from the United States to Japan, to the United Kingdom, to New Zealand is the most widespread and the fastest slide into recession since the 1930s. The latest forecast is for the global economy to contract by 1.3 per cent this year. It is generally accepted that Australia is better placed than many to cope with the contraction and then to recover and that we in Canberra are perhaps better placed than many of our fellow Australians. Indeed, today’s unemployment numbers reveal that. The ACT is the only place in Australia with an unemployment rate under four per cent.
But surely this challenge deserves a bit more than two days of close analysis and planning. The budget handed down earlier today by my colleague the Treasurer, Katy Gallagher, is a budget for such times as these—carefully crafted and caring. It is a budget that cushions the blow we must take as a community and spreads the impact, rather than loading the shock upon the community this year. It is a budget for the times—by that I do not just mean this week, which seems to be the attention span of the Liberal Party—in which a shrinking GST pool, the evaporation of earnings on our investments and a decline in revenue from construction activity have been the main culprits.
These few factors, in combination, have dealt a $1.1 billion blow to the budget in the past year, sliced two years of growth off our revenue and caused our superannuation investment assets, which we had anticipated would grow by $200 million over the year, instead to fall by $350 million. This drastic turnaround has occurred, almost in its entirety, in the past six months. I was grateful to hear at yesterday’s post-budget breakfast that the Liberal Party finally concede that my colleague Katy Gallagher had
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .