Page 3068 - Week 07 - Thursday, 1 July 2010
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thing that everyone else gets, which is the commonwealth coming in and becoming the dominant funder—they are not really the dominant funder, are they, because all they have done is just take our GST?—have had more GST taken away.
We had a tax that was put in place—opposed by Labor, mind you—a GST, which was about giving more autonomy to the states, giving them a growth tax. The Labor Party opposed that. Kevin Rudd called it “fundamental injustice day”. In fact, I think today is the 10th anniversary of what Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party referred to as “fundamental injustice day”. The states saw what a good growth tax it was for them. All we ever hear now from Katy Gallagher is complaints that we do not quite get enough GST, but then she goes and gives up 50 per cent. She gives up 50 per cent of our GST and allows it to be retained by the commonwealth, without—as Mr Smyth pointed out—any knowledge of the detail.
When Ms Gallagher was pushed on this in terms of the detail, she did not know. Now we see that the deal is changing, that they have abolished the oversight authority and that it will be handled in Treasury. So we are going to trust the commonwealth government, with very little oversight now, to retain our GST—50 per cent of it—and to spend it in our interests because, apparently, the commonwealth, under the Rudd-Gillard Labor government, have a really great record of looking after the ACT. They have reneged on promises for the ACT. They have not invested in infrastructure in the ACT. They have slashed funding to national institutions, and now ACT Labor are saying, “Yes, we trust you. We trust you so much that we will give heaps more than the rest. Kristina Keneally only trusts you to give one-third, but we trust you so much that we’ll give one-half. That’s how much we trust you.”
Ms Gillard, the new Prime Minister, has said that the government lost its way and that is why she had to take over. I would have thought that the scrambled nature of this health negotiation would be one of the ways that it had lost its way. It was desperate to change the conversation from the ETS so it said, “We need an agreement and we’re going to get an agreement.” Some of the state premiers resisted; they resisted strongly. John Brumby resisted strongly before he rolled over. Kristina Keneally negotiated hard. Collin Barnett in the end said, “No thanks. I’m not going to sign up to an agreement that you haven’t thought through, that you don’t know the details of, where I’m giving up my state’s GST, giving up autonomy, and then hoping that we’ll be looked after.”
This is what ACT Labor signed up to. They went to this absolutely flawed process and, because they were fawning over the former Prime Minister so much, they were desperate to sign up. To hide that fact they did not mention how much of the GST they had given up. When it was finally exposed that we had given up half when everyone else had given up one-third, the minister’s response was: “Well, we didn’t give it up. It’s not being retained.” Nicola Roxon begs to differ. Kristina Keneally begs to differ. All the other state and territory leaders who actually negotiated something on behalf of their communities beg to differ.
If it was not being retained and if we were not losing some autonomy then what was the negotiation about? If nothing was changing then what was the negotiation about? Kevin Rudd could have gone there and said: “Here’s the cheque and this is how many cheques you will be getting over the next few years. You’ll be getting these extra
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