Page 3027 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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Ms Gallagher: Read the papers, Zed. Get your facts straight.
MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Seselja and Ms Gallagher! We are having these conversations across the room again. Mr Hanson has the floor.
MR HANSON: Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. The topic here seems to be deficits, and let me quote again—I love quoting Labor—from one of their documents.
Ms Gallagher: It’s what you do when you’ve got 7½ minutes to fill.
MR HANSON: No, I don’t actually; I haven’t used all of my time. I quote:
We keenly appreciate that deficit budgets and high debt are serious impediments to dealing with social priorities.
So let’s just think, “Don’t worry about it; it’s seven years of deficits, temporary deficits; she’ll be right.” Let us just remember that every year that we have a deficit, that is having serious impediments to dealing with social priorities. So at some stage when you go into debt, when you have a deficit, you have to pay. What we await, more keenly, I think, is next year’s budget, and the budgets thereafter, where the people of Canberra will need to pay for the failure of this year’s budget.
MR DOSZPOT (Brindabella) (5.20): I would like to start my response with a couple of direct quotes from the Harris review of the ACT budget 2009-10. I quote:
The Commonwealth has budgeted $874 million for total general revenue assistance for the ACT in 2009-10. Of this about $35 million is for special purpose municipal payments. The balance of $839 million comprises GST payments. Thus, before the ACT budget is a week old, it has suffered a nearly $50 million GST revenue shortfall for the first year. Similar reductions are to occur in the forward estimates period.
This revenue adjustment will, unless offsetting steps are taken, reverberate through the budget and the forward estimates. It will increase deficits on operations, and worsen fiscal balances.
The territory’s headline operating balance will now reach new heights as a result of revised GST to deficits of around $135 million in 2009-10, $159 million in 2010-11, $211 million in 2011-12 and $205 million in 2012-13. We would anticipate and hope that the global financial crisis will by then be behind us. Yet, according to the government’s forecasts, they will continue to be in deficit until 2015-16. The question the opposition has posed to the government on this budget has been: why put off the hard economic decisions? This is irresponsible governance.
Department heads and community groups are faced with the challenge of coming up with the one per cent efficiency cuts, not now but in the next fiscal year. The efficiency dividend that needs to be found, starting next year, over the next three years in the Department of Education and Training alone is $12 million. The pain is obviously yet to come and a responsible government would not prolong the agony.
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