Page 2983 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
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Ms Gallagher: Come on, say what you want to say.
MR SMYTH: I do not have to say it. If you are feeling guilty, you can explain your absence.
Ms Gallagher: I’m not feeling guilty at all. It’s you guys that can’t cope.
MR SMYTH: I was not going to go there but, if you want to throw yourself in there, go for your life.
Mrs Dunne: “Here’s a bus. I shall throw myself under it.”
MR SMYTH: Yes: “Here’s a bus, this passing bus. I shall throw myself under.”
The Chief Minister attended in the stead of the Treasurer and, of course, he left it to officials because he was not across the brief either. But what was uncovered, because the opposition has done the hard work in analysing the numbers, was that the numbers are unbelievable. In particular, the forecasts—
Ms Gallagher: Except ACIL Tasman does not agree with that.
MR SMYTH: The Treasurer says ACIL Tasman again. ACIL Tasman are dotted throughout that report—
Mr Seselja: She wasn’t there when Treasury actually got it wrong.
MR SMYTH: She was not here to explain how Treasury had got it so wrong. ACIL Tasman actually says in many cases that these are way too conservative. ACIL Tasman question some of these numbers, and when you follow through with them the numbers do fall over.
The problem in particular with employment is that more up-to-date data was available before the Treasury was put to the printers, but that data was not taken up. What it does is it presents a much more dire picture of the state of employment in the ACT. You can do this for two reasons: you are conservative because you are afraid or you take conservative figures because you want to stage a miraculous recovery, maybe a year, maybe 18 months from now, to sweep into the election year. But the problem for people using this document to plan their business and to work out what they will do in regard to the ACT is that the document was flawed; the employment figures in particular had a massive decline in employment in the ACT.
To reach the estimate that the Treasurer put in the documents, we would have had to have a decline in employment when, month after month, the employment figures in the ACT were getting stronger. To see it go backwards by tens of thousands of jobs is just ludicrous, yet that is the proposition that the Treasurer would have had us believe in this document. This is why one can have no faith in this document. When the fundamentals are wrong, everything else that follows from it will also be flawed.
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