Page 1585 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
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budgeted $45 billion for this NBN that the federal government are recklessly pursuing. Of course, this is not a new message. If you look back at budgets and debts over the last 20 years, what you can see, particularly in the federal sphere, is that Labor governments simply cannot exercise fiscal discipline.
I recommend members go to a website titled LaborWaste.com.au. What you will see there are a number of charts and what you will see is debt—debt growing from 1991-92. So as much as you hear about the Hawke-Keating government being so fiscally responsible, go and look at the evidence, go and look at the facts. What you will see is that from the early 1990s through to 1995, 1996, debt increased exponentially and when the Howard government got in it was $96 billion.
Then when you look at the charts, you will see they go down again. The debt is reduced to the point that we got into surplus, and we were in surplus. Then what happened? The government changed. Labor got in and the chart went back up again—all the way up. It is like a roller-coaster, isn’t it? The Treasurer comes down here and has a bit of a smile. But I think we know that this is a pattern of behaviour between Liberal and Labor governments—this roller-coaster ride of debts and deficit under Labor and surplus and saving under the Liberals.
The federal government have been forced to rein in their spending. They are already sending the message out to Australians that this federal budget will be a tight one. In light of the debt that they have put Australia into, they just could not do their normal round of extravagant spending. This is where it becomes a real problem for Canberra. As we know, for such a small jurisdiction, so intrinsicaly linked into what the federal government does, if they sneeze, we catch the flu. That might be what has happened to my colleague Mr Smyth.
In the 2009 estimates hearings, Chris Faulks, the Chief Executive of the Canberra Business Council, stated that the worst case scenario is a perfect storm where you have budgets at both levels taking drastic measures to return the budgets to balance. That is exactly what we are heading to. The Treasurer has stated that there will be no new spending in this budget, which means that we are heading towards the perfect storm, potentially, for the residents of the ACT. The federal budget will be tight; the territory budget will be tight. Why? Because successively the Labor governments at both levels cannot understand that you cannot endlessly spend and spend without consequence.
Madam Assistant Speaker, in 2001-02 the ACT budget was $1.5 billion. In 2011-12 the budget looks to be about $4 billion. The question is: do the residents of the ACT feel any better for this almost fourfold increase? The residents I speak to whilst out door-knocking or at shopping centres certainly do not think so. They are sick of waiting longer for services, they are sick of the city not looking as tidy and they are sick of continually being hit on the cost of living.
In 2001-02 budgeted revenue for the territory was about $2 billion. In 2010-11 budgeted revenue was nearly $3.7 billion. This is an increase of revenue of 80 per cent. There is an effect of CPI but, if you discount that, it still represents a 40 per cent increase in revenue for the ACT. But instead of using the expenditure to
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