Page 3032 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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was simply not up to the job of being Treasurer. Indeed, just as we have a shadow shadow planning minister in Mr Corbell, it appears we have a shadow shadow Treasurer in Mr Barr. He will come here and tell us his thoughts on the budget. Of course, he did not spend much time going on about the budget. He did not spend a lot of time defending it or talking in detail about the apparent plan for recovery. This is, Mr Speaker, an irresponsible budget.
We need to look at the difference in approach of the Liberal Party in opposition versus the Labor Party in opposition. The Labor Party’s approach to budgeting in opposition was virtually to vote against it without looking at it. I think they voted against six out of seven budgets when they were in opposition during the Carnell years. Six out of seven budgets and Jon Stanhope voted against three out of four. Whether it was a good budget, a bad budget or an indifferent budget, they were going to vote against it because they did not want to support it for whatever reason.
We take a different approach. We only vote against the budget if we believe it is fundamentally flawed. We will always have a critique of a budget, but we will only vote against it where we believe it is so seriously flawed that we cannot in good conscience support it. That is why we are not supporting this budget. It is because it is an irresponsible budget. It is because it leads the people of the ACT into years and years and years of deficits. Years and years and years of deficits and years and years and years in the mountains of debt.
We had Ms Gallagher saying that she has never called it a temporary deficit. I am happy to accept that has never called it a temporary deficit. But she said it is part of a long-term plan. So I said: “Well, what is it then? How do we define it?” Ms Gallagher has now informed us, and she can confirm this when she gets up to speak, given that it is not a temporary deficit, that it is a long-term deficit. It is part of a long-term plan. Long-term deficit under Katy Gallagher and the ACT Labor Party; that is what they are consigning us to. Anyone who believes that it will end with seven years of deficits I think is very much on the optimistic side. We have four years of figures which show deficits. We are told that after seven years in 2015-16, this government expects the budget to be balanced or back into surplus.
Mrs Dunne: On heroic assumptions of five per cent growth every year.
MR SESELJA: They are heroic assumptions. Of course, we do not know where the economy will be in seven years time. We do not know whether there will be another recession in seven years time and what that might do to revenue. It is worth looking at what the cross-party estimates committee said about the lack of a credible plan to get the budget back into surplus. The report states:
The Committee discussed at length the lack of detail in the Budget papers that made it impossible to clearly identify a plan to achieve the recovery predicted by the ACT Government … no other detailed plans were presented in the Budget to demonstrate a strategy to return the Budget to surplus … The committee is concerned at the lack of a clear plan for returning the budget to surplus.
Mr Speaker, these are not my words. These are not the words of Mr Smyth. These are the words of the cross-party committee which was charged with looking at this budget.
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