Page 5497 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 17 November 2010
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and she earns $40,000. They have a $300,000 mortgage. They have two children—one who is in part-time childcare and one who goes to the local Catholic school. Mick is also repaying his HECS debt. They have private health insurance and one car with a small car loan. Their family income is about $120,000 and they pay tax between them of $30,800. Mick also pays a HECS debt of $6,400. They pay Medicare to the tune of $1,200. Their mortgage is $27,000. They pay approximately $10,000 a year in childcare and another $13,000 a year to pay for and run their car. They are modest shoppers, but that costs them $10,400 a year. In addition, they have utilities—phone, gas, electricity, internet, water—of $6,000, and they pay school fees of around $3,000. In addition to their Medicare, they pay $1,800 in private health insurance.
That leaves them less than $10,000 out of their $120,000 income for everything else, and that includes rates, insurance, home maintenance, gardening, the odd outing, and perhaps even some shoes and clothes for the kids. They have got $10,000 left. So Mr Stanhope can sit there and say, “It is all right, these people have nothing to worry about,” but let us look at the figures.
Mr Stanhope does not want us to look at the figures over the term of the Stanhope government, because when we do that, we see that the overall CPI in Australia has risen by 27.9 per cent but in the ACT it has risen by 28.4 per cent. I want to drill down into some of the issues that we have addressed, and the issue that I particularly want to talk about is water.
In the ACT we have seen a 106 per cent increase in water costs since the Stanhope government came to power. Of course, both the government and the Greens want to blame somebody else for the rising cost of water in the ACT. It is not Jon Stanhope’s fault. It is not Jon Stanhope who increased the water abstraction charge, doubled it and then doubled it again. It is not Jon Stanhope who introduced the utilities tax. He has not contributed at all. No, it is the ICRC across the road! These nasty people, they are the ones who bring about the increase in costs. “It is some independent person and we are not responsible for it.” What the ICRC is doing is responding to the policy settings set by Jon Stanhope—the man who increased the water abstraction charge, then increased it again, the man who introduced the utilities tax. All of those things go to the bottom line.
In addition to that, we see that the cost of water in the ACT has already risen by $100 to cover the cost of the dam, which we expected to be $145 million plus 30 per cent, so $188 million. We have an admission from the utility that, as a result of the blow-out in that cost, by 2013 ACT taxpayers will be paying an extra $220 a year, at least, in current dollars to pay for the cost of water security in the ACT.
Why are we paying so much? Because of the mismanagement of the Stanhope government. In 2004 when it was obvious to everybody that we needed to do something about water security, only Jon Stanhope and his cohort were saying: “No, no, no, we can’t possibly do that. We can’t do that.” Remember, it was in 2006 that this Chief Minister said on one occasion: “We may never have to build a dam. Not for 30 years. You know, we might get away with it for another 30 years.” The next year, he had changed his mind. But in that time, we have had years and years of delay, which has seen a blow-out in the cost of the water security projects in the ACT.
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