Page 3000 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
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We have also exerted wage restraint, and I expect a very positive outcome on our bargaining with our public sector colleagues in the next couple of days. That will ensure that those budget projections remain largely intact, which is where we have sought to ensure that our wages outcome in terms of the recurrent spend comes in under three per cent. I think there will be some positive news about that in the next few days.
This was a challenge for the government to put together just in terms of last year’s budget, but I would also say that every budget is a challenge to put together when you look at the expenditure requests that come from agencies and ministers around new spending by the ACT government. I have to say almost all of those initiatives that come forward are worthy, and it is a hard job to go through and cull them, pare them back and ask people to make savings or find internal ways of funding those programs. In terms of trying to find the balance, this budget does it. It allows us to continue to invest in the growing city, and you will see that from our land release program, the infrastructure spend that we have put in place, the continued investment in health facilities in terms of additional health services and also in terms of the growth of the education system.
That demonstrates the growth of our city—the growth in the number of children enrolled in our schools, the need for more teachers and the need for more schools in both the public sector and increased enrolments in the non-government sector as well. All of that demonstrates exactly what we have been talking about.
In terms of the future, I am very confident that we will deliver on our budget plan. Obviously I stand by the projections Treasury has made. There are concerns that they are at times too conservative. Again, I go to the independent analysis provided by ACIL Tasman, where the repeated and common comment—much to Mr Smyth’s dismay—is that the estimates, the forecasts, appear reasonable. That is said on about six or seven or eight occasions.
Mr Smyth: Katy, Katy, Katy.
MS GALLAGHER: They do, Mr Smyth. You would have loved a typo or something so that what appeared was “unreasonable”, but it says they appear reasonable. It also goes to the difficulty of forecasting in an economy where the largest player and its budget decisions are unknown to the ACT Treasury. That creates some concern in terms of how you put those forecasts and projections together. But, even with 53 per cent of the economy attributable to the commonwealth government’s activity, Treasury perform very well when measured against other jurisdictions when it comes to the accuracy of their forecasts.
I do not think the opposition understand the amount of work that goes into putting a budget together and the amount of work that goes into trying to provide the Assembly with all the information it needs for coherent and comprehensive discussion on the financial performance of the territory. I hear what Ms Hunter has said about the need to constantly look to improve the way we present our budget papers, but budget papers are merely one way that the government provides information about the performance of agencies. There are also the quarterly performance reports and the
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