Page 1903 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 May 2010
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you would be disappointed; it is not there. If you were looking for smaller government, you would be disappointed; it is not there. If you were looking for a genuine investment in tourism, you would be disappointed; it is not there. If you were looking for bold and forward thinking action, you would be disappointed; it is not there, despite the claim. If you were looking for tough decisions, you would certainly be disappointed, because, despite the claims, there are no tough decisions in this budget.
The Treasurer is pleased that she has been able to report an apparent surplus of $54 million for the financial year 2009-10. What she did not say is that this is a sham surplus. The only reason there is a surplus is because of the funds flowing from the federal government’s various stimulus packages. Without $158 million of federal government funds, the ACT would have been in deficit. I will say more about this in a moment.
The annual budget for a jurisdiction is meant to provide some vision for where the government of the day sees the jurisdiction evolving. Unfortunately, for the second budget from the Treasurer, this budget fails on all these counts. The Treasurer claims that this budget has a plan, as, indeed, she claimed that the 2009-10 ACT budget had a plan. In budget paper 3 at page 17, the Treasurer acknowledges that the need for a plan remains, and she is right. The sad thing is that we are yet to see a genuine plan for the future of the ACT budget. Sadly, the people of the ACT are still waiting for any plan to extract the territory from the fiscal mess of the recent years and the deficits that are to come.
We did not see a plan in May 2009, and we still do not have a plan today. While there obviously have been some impacts from the global economic and financial crisis flowing through to the ACT, this has not been the complete story. Many commentators are now calling it the North Atlantic crisis or, indeed, simply the North American financial crisis.
What we have seen over the past 12 months is frantic inaction by this government. The Treasurer told us in 2009 that all sorts of decisions would be made to bring the ACT back into surplus. There would be a razor gang, departments and agencies would bring proposals for savings, and these departments and agencies would have their own internal savings strategies. We really do not know what has happened, in fact, with these intentions. What we do know is that, after many months of failing to get a reasonable outcome, the Treasurer had to establish a panel of external advisers to try and find the savings that were sought, and additional funding of $4.5 million was found to pay these advisers.
In simple terms, what seems to have happened between the 2009 budget and the 2010 budget is that the Treasurer has been sitting in her office a-wishin’ and a-hopin’ that something would happen and the territory’s budgetary issues would be resolved. We are also gratified to read in budget paper 3 on page 20 that the razor gang will continue to meet to develop and assess savings measures. I await those outcomes with interest.
My take on this budget is that it is extremely mundane, even pedestrian in its character. An editorial in the Canberra Times noted:
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