Page 2150 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 May 2009
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It seems that we are headed to the depths of deficits in 2009-10, and it seems that this is all based on guesswork from the Treasurer. There seems to be a great deal of guesswork, or at least a great deal of hope and perhaps a wing and a prayer, from the Treasurer. I think that this is why the Treasurer has delayed the cuts and efficiency dividends until next year. Has she delayed it because the Treasurer is engaging in more guesswork and more hope that the end result will be that, if you hold your breath and cross your fingers, come May 2010 the global financial crisis will have gone away? It is a long time to hold your breath.
This government is ignoring the global financial crisis. It likes to use it as an excuse, but its policies, as they are poured out in this budget, show that it really does not take very much into account. It wants to employ more than 1,000 new staff this year; it wants to spend $240 million in excess of what it did last year. This is not a budget of a government that is concerned with the effects of the global crisis; it is the budget of a government that cannot save for the a rainy day that is the global financial crisis. It is the budget of a government that does not have the economic skills to be able to manage its way through a global financial crisis. It is the budget of a government that continues to be unable to get its priorities right.
Even so, there are some glimmers of hope and some positive comments that need to be made in relation to the budget. Firstly, I will turn to the Department of Justice and Community Safety and look particularly at the increased resources for the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions. On the back of years of low staff morale and impossible work levels, this government has allocated funding for another five prosecutors and three support staff. I congratulate the minister on this and I thank him for it. This is good news, and I think that it will take the pressure off to some degree.
But low morale and excessive workloads are not the only problems that face the DPP. One of its significant problems is the lack of competitiveness with other agencies in this country and federally. The question that plays on my mind is whether the increased funding will be sufficient to attract and retain staff in the office of the DPP, and I will be pursuing this matter in the estimates process. The effectiveness of this policy initiative will only be borne out over a number of years, and I will be taking particular interest in this.
One of the issues that is welcomed is the enhanced fine enforcement initiative which is $300,000 in this financial year increasing to $378,000 in the final outyear. The thing that concerns me about that is that the return on that is actually quite low by comparison. The revenue returns equal the expenses in this financial year and only rise to half a million dollars in each of the outyears. There are considerable problems with fine defaulters; we have seen in the articles in the Canberra Times where the figure is in the vicinity of $13 million in unrecovered fines. I think that I will be working with the Attorney-General and other members of the Assembly to ensure that that enhanced fine enforcement is more productive than it appears in the budget papers.
Turning to the arts, we have seen the scrapping of the per cent for art scheme—hallelujah. I want to make it clear, and it needs to made emphatically clear to the
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