Page 2982 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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The point around cost of living is not that we do not do it or that we are not interested in it; it is the fact that it is at the heart of the budget deliberations. It is at the heart of the budget deliberations. It permeates everything the budget cabinet discusses: what will this mean; what are the advantages; what are the disadvantages; what are the price impacts on individuals and householders; what are the price impacts on businesses? All of that is part of every single decision of the cabinet through the budget cabinet process.
That does not mean that fees and charges will not rise; they will. I would be very surprised if the Liberal Party are running a line that fees and charges should never increase—that they should just remain flat forever and never increase, and that any increase therefore is something that cannot be afforded. There has to be reasonable growth. When your health budget is growing at 10 per cent a year and it is a third of your budget, it is simply unsustainable to argue that government fees and charges cannot rise with some formula of indexation.
And that is what you see in this budget. There are no new taxes in this budget, despite what the opposition is trying to argue.
Mr Smyth interjecting—
MS GALLAGHER: I am sure that we have answered that. I do not have the question on notice in relation to the question that Mr Smyth is interjecting on, but I am happy to dig it out. I am sure we have answered it for Mr Smyth a number of times.
There are a number of initiatives in this budget that go to issues of cost of living. There is the taxi subsidy scheme. There is the utility concession at $12.3 million that I have already spoken of. In housing there are increases in the street to home program. In justice there is the Legal Aid help desk. In sustainable development there is the program for improving energy and water efficiencies for low income and disadvantaged households. And in ACT Housing itself there is the expansion of social housing and the new money, $8 million a year, going into the expansion of public housing energy efficiency.
Overall, when you put all of the assistance together, in a recurrent sense it is $21 million going in assistance to low income households and a capital injection of $17.4 million. Yes, we would like to do more. Yes, it is probably not enough. I am prepared to take that criticism, but I will not accept criticism that this budget has not looked very closely at cost of living pressures for all Canberrans.
There is only limited capacity in what we can do across the board, but in this budget we were very keen to make sure that, where savings needed to be found, we did not resort to just looking at our own revenue lines and increasing those but turned to ourselves and looked for efficiencies internally, again protecting any cost increases on all Canberrans.
This is a sensible budget. I look forward to continuing debate. I would like to thank Treasury for all the work that they do in putting this budget together. We are, as an
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