Page 2141 - Week 07 - Thursday, 16 May 2013
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taxation revenue is still projected to increase by 17 per cent. Obviously he is taking lessons from his mentor Wayne Swan where you refuse to acknowledge the fact that your revenue has gone up.
In particular, I think there are always interesting things like the lease variation charge, which has been revised downwards by $4 million in the current year. However, no revision has been made in the future years and we now know that in the nine months leading up to 31 March the lease variation charge has still only collected some $7 million, $16 million short of the original budget. It is hard to see how we will now go from $7 million to $19 million just in the last quarter of the year. Yet there we are in the outyears with $24.6 million, $26.3 million and $28.2 million in what we all know to be a softening market. Indeed, the property market is now likely to suffer the effects of a government that is reducing the space that it wants to contain the public service in. So when we look at the lease variation charge, we have to look at it with a great deal of scepticism.
The ICRC’s review into regulated water and sewerage services at ACTEW has so far indicated that water prices will be decreased after the report is finalised on 12 June. As Mr Sullivan points out, this would mean ACTEW would not have the capacity to pay dividends for a number of years. With this in mind, more than $350 million would be wiped off the budget bottom line over the next three years, which, indeed, would increase the deficit in future years and have a huge impact on the planned return to surplus in 2015-16.
For members’ interest, the dividend in 2011-12 was $69 million, in 2012-13, the current year, it is estimated to be $85 million, but in the coming three years it is $106 million, $117 million and $125 million, all of which the government needs to get to their surplus in 2015-16. If, as suggested by the ICRC, prices go down instead of the increase that ACTEW wanted and we take into account the comments that Mr Sullivan made, just that single initiative will, of course, see the very slim deficit disappear. So we need to also take that into account.
Under superannuation expenses, we see other superannuation expenses and superannuation interest costs have been revised upwards by $150 million in the current year. However, they remain unchanged going forward. The interest expenses increase by $56 million, totalling $577 million in interest over the forward estimates.
When we look at capital works for the current year, $250 million of the $812 million originally budgeted has been pushed to later income years, predominately 2013-14 and 2014-15. And, of course, we have already seen the government walk away from some pretty major projects, much to the dismay of the industry. At a time when the industry was looking to the territory government, the withdrawal of, particularly, the hospital tender has caused the industry a great deal of grief, particularly those firms that had spent significant amounts of money to meet the tender, now to have the tender withdrawn. It is that callous disregard of the business community that is really leading people in the business community to simply question what the government is up to. Capital expenditure has been cut by $41 million over the forward estimates.
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