Page 4512 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 14 October 2009
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One of the first things we did when we were returned to government was to deliver on our commitment to provide emergency financial relief to community organisations for volunteers and carers. We provided $2.5 million to a range of community organisations in acknowledgement of the impact of the demand they were seeing across their services. I know that UnitingCare Kippax were one of the organisations who provided a lot of that service, and I think received some of that money.
The third part of Ms Hunter’s motion calls on the government to commit to quarantining community organisations which provide assistance to people in poverty from efficiency dividend measures in the 2010-11 budget. We have made a commitment to return the budget to surplus. The application of an efficiency dividend is one measure in the government’s plan. However, we have been very mindful of the economic and financial circumstances and as such have adopted a longer term approach due to the need to preserve services and provide stability. That is precisely why we chose a longer term plan, a seven-year plan, to recover the budget, which I know we have been criticised for by other members in this place. But a seven-year plan did allow us flexibility to address and vary that plan, if we needed to, based on what we were seeing occurring on our own budget.
The thinking behind that was so that we did not have to create a short, sharp shock to the budget, which would have had the impact of affecting community organisations if we had wanted to recover the budget in the forward estimates period over the next three budget cycles and when we are looking for savings in the order of $200 million in that final year. That is a bigger job than the functional review. It is a job that worries me enormously about how we are going to address that deficit. There may be some reprieve in the sense that our recovery appears to be occurring earlier than had been anticipated when we put the last budget together, but any recovery will not address the $200 million savings target which is what we required of ourselves in that final forward estimates year.
So I am happy to say that the government are very committed to protecting community organisations from the savings measures outlined in the budget plan that we have asked agencies to provide us, particularly in relation to the one per cent dividend. We have asked agencies to come up with recommendations to budget cabinet that do not in the first instance seek to just reduce job numbers across the ACT public service, or indeed just reduce services whether it be by grants or our contract arrangements with the community services sector.
I have seen the earlier results of some of those proposals coming from agencies and I think that, whilst it will still be a hard job, that initial efficiency dividend will be able to be met without any significant impact on community organisations at all. It is the bigger job that worries me the most and, as I said, the last thing that we as a government wish to do is to reduce our efforts in the community sector. Indeed, one of our agreements in the parliamentary agreement is around looking at sustainability and viability in the community services sector.
Tomorrow we will be debating the community sector long service leave bill in this place. I know that the work that is currently being done by Des Heaney and associates in relation to the industrial relations matters facing the community sector will come
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