Page 2933 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 29 June 2011
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I think, though, that what we have is a Treasurer who has a remarkable capacity for dithering when firm decisions are called for and I guess, in part, this is perhaps why she is handing the portfolio across to her deputy. He might take control and achieve many of the things that the Treasurer has failed to achieve—for instance, the budget savings or imposing her will on the departments and agencies to keep to their budgets. And it will be interesting to see in the coming days, when we finally get the Treasurer’s advance summary and the end-of-year summaries, which departments have blown their budgets and have not made their savings.
Simply letting the world swell around her—and we had that wonderful comment that she found it very frustrating and was reduced to tearing her hair out—is not the leadership that one should have and that is not the leadership certainly that the people of the ACT deserve. The Treasurer does not have a plan to reduce the budget deficits. This is quite clear. She says she has a plan. But when we question the veracity of that plan we find, in things like the 2011 budget notes, $149 million of savings are still required to try to get the ACT budget back into surplus. That can be found in budget paper 3, pages 18 and 28. I suspect there is a lot of wishing and hoping to achieve this target. And the question really is: where has the Treasurer been over the past three years?
There are two contradictory trends in the ACT budget parameters that are worth discussion. First, consider revenue. In the 2009 budget the Treasurer told us of a substantial loss of revenue because of the GFC. You only need to refer to the budget speech, budget paper 2 on page 2, to see this statement. It really is quite something.
As to the loss of revenue, of course the reality is something quite different. Using the Treasurer’s own figures one can see that the ACT budget is gaining something like $1.3 billion more than was initially estimated by the Treasurer across the years from 2008-09 to 2011-12—an additional $1.3 billion—when the Treasurer told us that we had lost around $1.1 billion. It is worth reading this from 5 May 2009:
Mr Speaker, the impact on our budget has been more severe.
…
These factors alone contribute to a revenue loss of around $1.1 billion since the last Budget, and around two years growth off our revenue base.
We lost a quarter of the budget in a single year. It was quite a remarkable achievement.
Mr Coe: Just another year.
MR SMYTH: Yes, it is just another year. That is right. The Treasurer told us that we had lost around $1.1 billion. This means that the ACT would have received across those three years an additional $2.4 billion more than Treasury had estimated over the period or an average of something like an additional $0.6 billion each year in additional revenue. According to these numbers, the ACT is not in any sort of parlous state, as the Treasurer would have you believe. On the contrary, just on the revenue numbers, you would have to say we are doing very nicely in regard to other jurisdictions.
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