Page 2868 - Week 07 - Thursday, 7 June 2012
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
We have seen the tax take and we have seen the rollover of capital works projects. The problem is that you just cannot trust anything the government say. So let us go to the third leg of their budget plan: “we are going to roll out infrastructure”. Remember that in the $900 million for infrastructure this year only $200 million of it is new works; the rest of it is rollovers or carry-forwards from previous years because they have not delivered it. We have had damning reports from the Auditor-General on their inability to deliver. It is that inability to deliver, that lack of value for money for taxpayers, that is causing the huge increases in tax this year.
We should go to the record debt. There are additional borrowings of up to $790 million over 2012-13 and 2013-14. This debt is projected to be paid down relatively quickly, but there is still some risk in having that debt in the first place. It is a huge increase on the debt that we would normally carry. The standard Labor operating procedure is big deficits, more debt and higher taxes. There is a triple for you.
One of the great initiatives of this Assembly—and I have never thought a simple one-line amendment to an act could be so powerful—was the Liberals’ initiative to put the cost of living statement into the budget. The Greens and the Labor Party resisted this for years. It was in a couple of estimates reports and we had a couple of motions on it. We eventually tried to put it in through a change to the law. At that stage they woke up: the cost of living does matter. “It is the cost of living, stupid”—to paraphrase an older statement.
Budgets are not just numbers; budgets are about people—in this case the people of the city where we live. You only need to go through the cost of living statement, where the government in some ways have fessed up. They have got their special family: two adults and two kids who have two cars but never seem to drive them and never seem to park them. They never use the telephone because they do not pay the utilities tax and they do not pay any parking, even though we know that the revenue from parking is going up 22 per cent this year.
It is a special family. If we had a slightly more real family, it would be interesting. The average income of the family that Mr Barr picked was $123,000. As it goes, that is okay, but what about the median income level? Median is the point where there are as many people on the income level below as there are above. That income level in the ACT is in the order of $100,000, according to the ABS, for a family of four.
If that family had an income of $100,000—and these are broad approximations—you would expect they would pay federal tax of about $25,000. That would leave them with $75,000. Deduct what the minister claims—call it about $10,000—and that leaves them with $65,000. Deduct mortgage payments of, say, $25,000. That leaves them with $40,000. Deduct transport costs of, say, $100 a week for petrol—there is $5,000—and it goes down to $35,000. Knock off, say, $10,000 a year for food, $200 a week—that is probably about right—and it leaves $25,000.
That is $500 for a family of four for a week to spend on education, holidays, recreation, clothing—I forgot Foxtel; you have got to have Foxtel—and coffee,
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video