Page 3035 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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The council goes on to say:
This leads to the question: what programs and services will have to be cut by the government?
Of course, what they are doing through inaction, through this lack of a plan and through a real failure to look at the areas of wasteful spending is that they are making the comeback harder. They are making the outyears harder. When we see those budgets in future years, we see the serious cuts to services, we see the blow-out in the deficits and we see the moves to increase taxes and to get ACT residents to pay more and more for their services, we will look back to this budget and the lack of a plan and the lack of action and say that this is where it really started.
We can go through the last seven years, of course, where they wasted the absolute boom years. That is the other part of this story. They wasted the boom years. They did not make the structural reforms that were needed. They did not control spending. Their plan and their response to the challenges that we now face is to do nothing for a while, to hope for the best and to point to some unallocated savings that they may or may not be able to find in future years. One thing is certain. There will have to be tough decisions in those years. They can pretend now that that is not going to be the case.
Another thing that is certain is that by not doing anything now those decisions are going to be more savage, those decisions are going to be tougher. The impact on the community will be far harder and far greater than would have been necessary otherwise. We had Chris Faulks from the Canberra Business Council appear before the committee. She said:
Our concerns relate to the magnitude and duration of the forecast budget deficits. It is our view that some quite serious measures will need to be taken to claw back those deficits in future years—that is, beyond 2010. Those concerns are amplified by the fact that the budget does not clearly outline how the ACT government expects to eliminate the deficit by 2015-16.
It is not just us saying it; it is not just the Liberal Party; it is not just the Greens who also agreed with these conclusions in the committee. It is also the Canberra Business Council saying that those concerns are amplified by the fact that the budget does not clearly outline how the ACT government expects to eliminate the deficit by 2015-16. There is, of course, limited detail presented relating to efficiency dividends expected by the ACT government. The committee made a recommendation in relation to that:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government provide to the Assembly substantiation for its revenue predictions, detailed information regarding efficiency dividend application, and justification for how revenue and expenditure will be reconciled to return the Budget to surplus within the specified seven years.
I do not have the response in front of me, but I think the response was, “Yes, it is all in there.” The committee did not think so, looking at the budget, and the committee
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