Page 2866 - Week 07 - Thursday, 7 June 2012
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disabilities. There is $2 million for disability funding in this year’s budget; there is nothing in the outyears. So magically these people who will assist some of the most vulnerable kids in our community will be employed for a year and will live in limbo then of not knowing whether there will be money in the further budget.
But that is not the only place that appears. I see that the ESA, to maintain operational capacity, has $3.7 million in this year’s budget and this year’s budget alone. $3.7 million on operational capacity is jobs, but they are not jobs funded beyond the end of the next financial year. There is nothing in 2013-14, nothing in 2014-15 and nothing in 2015-16. This is how you bring down an ever growing deficit. It is the same trick we saw with Wayne Swan. It is the smoke and mirrors of Labor Party budgeting: we budget for something for a year and we will get to the rest of it after the election.
But the reality is that people know what the government stand for and they know about their inability to deliver. We have seen this now over a couple of taxes. We have seen it through the enormous lease variation tax. Perhaps the Treasurer should point out to the Chief Minister in his own budget where he says, “Every tax has an effect.” And they do. Mr Barr has appeared before estimates and has said, “Every tax has a drag.” Yes, it does. We have got the magic lease variation charge that apparently has no effect and now we have got changes to stamp duty that apparently are good for the community but are driving away investment.
The ACT Property Council says that this is the worst budget handed down by this government in terms of the impact on the property sector. I quote:
Executive Director Catherine Carter says investors wanting to purchase large commercial properties will be hurt by the latest changes …
“I think it will signal a message out there to the rest of Australia that the ACT really isn’t a great place to invest in.”
The master builders said effectively the same: these are ill considered and ill thought out because the world’s greatest Treasurer over here wanted to race ahead with reform, bucking what his Chief Minister had said—that this was a new era of openness and accountability—and indeed bucking what they promised when they released the government response to the taxation review that over the next few months they would seek feedback on the taxation review, its recommendations and possible reforms moving forward. You cannot trust a single word they say when a government document does not even last a month. The document on the Quinlan tax review has not lasted a single month.
We then go to the deficit. The deficit for 2012-13 is $318 million—or, in fact, it is a deficit of $396 million if the gain on superannuation investments is excluded. It is one of the highest deficits since self-government. How did the Australian Financial Review describe it, Madam Assistant Speaker? They called it “a black hole”. That is exactly what it is: the ACT’s black hole expands to $318.3 million.
The ACT government have flagged a bigger than expected budget deficit of $318 million. As we know, the Labor Party all over this country specialise in deficits.
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