Page 65 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 15 February 2011
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the commonwealth and a mystery one-off tax assessment and associated interest revenue. I had hoped that the Treasurer might explain that reference.
Ms Gallagher: What?
MR SMYTH: I had hoped the Treasurer would explain the one-off tax assessment and the associated interest.
Ms Gallagher: I can’t.
MR SMYTH: But she now tells me across the chamber, deepening the mystery, that she cannot. Then, of course, spending was more than one per cent over budget. This resulted from increased use of nursing contractors, higher payments to public trading enterprises and increased community service grants.
The significant concern that I have is that, in an environment where the ACT government is meant to be exercising substantial spending restraint, spending in the first six months of this financial year increased by nearly $40 million. I need to remind the Assembly that this lack of spending restraint has taken place despite the Treasurer saying that there is a strict regime of cost cutting, the efficiency dividends may well be relaxed, there needs to be some flexibility around our savings and there should be, or there could be, an “easing up on the unallocated savings”. It is difficult to reconcile how the Treasurer will return the ACT budget to surplus, as part of her grand plan, if she cannot restrain spending by this government.
This brings me to the response of the Treasurer to this latest financial information. Treasurers of jurisdictions have a serious responsibility to represent important financial information very carefully. Consider how our Treasurer has dealt with the two reports that were released yesterday. In the world of political spin, this Treasurer takes the prize.
The Treasurer has also seriously misrepresented the budget outcome that is set out in these reports. The Treasurer crows about the outcome for the six months. The forecast deficit could fall from $84 million to $6 million, and why is this? Apparently one of the things, the Treasurer said, is population growth and a booming housing market. But clearly that is not correct.
The reduction in the forecast deficit for 2010-11 has little to do with population growth, as the Treasurer would have us believe. Indeed, I suspect it has almost no role in this outcome. The reduction in the expected deficit is the result of, simply, “a large one-off tax assessment finalised in 2010-11 relating to prior years”. The total value of this tax assessment, with interest, is $96.6 million. It is also because of the government’s continuing reliance largely on property taxes. Hence the reduction in the deficit had nothing to do with the actions of the Treasurer and everything to do with a substantial, one-off transaction.
I am also concerned, and we all should be concerned, at this misrepresentation by the Treasurer of what these reports tell us, because the words in each report directly contradict the Treasurer’s spin. She should apologise to the Assembly and to the
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