Page 2765 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 23 June 2009
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people are on an income of $35,000 a year, it does not mean that they should not be able to buy their own home at some point.
We have been struggling—and, I have to say, with successful outcome—over the last six or seven years now to provide those opportunities. The land rent scheme is the most recent one to come off the assembly line. I have to say this, and say this as strongly as I can. This is the provision of an opportunity, not an obligation. Nobody is forcing people to go to the CPS credit union and do it. It is there if they want to do it. Nobody is forcing people to go to west Macgregor and buy a property for $290,000, but it is there if they want to. Nobody is going to force public housing tenants to pick up the shared equity scheme, but it is there if they want it. Nobody is going to force people to buy the property they live in, but we would hope they would look at it. What we are seeing here is the provision of an opportunity. These guys should learn a lesson from the provision of that opportunity instead of bagging it.
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Minister for Transport, Minister for Territory and Municipal Services, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Indigenous Affairs and Minister for the Arts and Heritage) (8.46): I would like to take this opportunity to commend the appropriation bill and the 2009-10 budget to the Assembly and to the ACT community.
The budget is a careful and considered one. It takes a very measured approach to these extraordinary times. It is proven and targeted. It makes no significant cuts to services or imposes any increases in taxes. It is a budget that puts our community first and delivers the service the community needs. It invests in infrastructure, and so ensures that we are ready for the future. It is a budget that quite deliberately provides stability and confidence. It supports jobs. It meets the challenges of today and invests for tomorrow.
As the Treasurer indicated in her budget speech on 5 May, this is a budget that provides modest but strategically targeted additional expenditure for key election commitments, as well as the commitments contained in the parliamentary agreement with the ACT Greens. In addition, the government has included additional expenditure to meet agency pressures in key areas of government service delivery, the areas Canberrans most depend on: the health system; our teachers; the bus system; and our municipal services.
Although the global financial crisis that is afflicting the world presents the ACT with challenges, it has not meant that we are unable to pursue and progress the commitments we have made to this community. It has meant that we have had to prioritise, to be creative and to maximise and leverage every dollar. In this we have been rightly assisted by the commonwealth stimulus package.
We do need to put this budget into context. The World Bank, in its latest global development finance report released on 22 June this year, states that the world economy is forecast to contract by 2.9 per cent in 2009 compared with a prior estimate of a 1.7 per cent decline made just three months earlier.
The global economy is not forecast to begin expanding until the second half of 2009, with the global GDP rate expected to rebound to two per cent in 2010 and 3.2 per cent
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