Page 2848 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 August 2013
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year. But here we are, 14 months after the original reforms were put in place, and we still do not have the data.
The act says, according to section 4, that the proposed budget must be prepared taking into account the principles of responsible fiscal management. And in defining the principles of responsible fiscal management it says “giving full, accurate and timely disclosure of financial information”. We have never had full, accurate and timely disclosure of the effect of the tax changes on the rates for the people of the ACT. Never. We do not have it now.
But again we are being asked to pass the bill that does not comply with that statute. We do not have full, accurate and timely disclosure of the financial information about what will happen to the ACTEW dividend. We can, in about two weeks apparently; so I do not see why there is the need to rush through it today when we could reasonably have this debate in September, with full, accurate and timely disclosure.
We certainly do not have full, accurate and timely disclosure of the financial information about capital metro. It was not, Mr Rattenbury, in the budget delivered in June. So right from the start, the budget has not complied with the law. We know that we did not get the information on rates changes in last year’s budget either.
So we have the standard discourse in this place where the Treasurer jumps up and starts to slur, the Chief Minister backs him up on the slur and keeps going. She says, “No confidence is serious. Go outside.” I am quite happy to go outside and say, “Here is the law. You make your own determination as to whether or not the Treasurer has complied with that law.” And I do not believe you have, and I am quite happy to say that outside. So there you go.
Then their slur was that we are not ready to debate. We disagree on a lot of things in this place but I think people would give me some credit that, whatever the subject you want to debate, I can probably at the drop of a hat debate most things. If you want to overturn Mr Corbell’s 16-hour time limit on the debate, I am happy to go for as long as it takes and debate—
Ms Gallagher: I think we have done that already.
MR SMYTH: There you go. You cannot say on one hand, “You are trying to stop the debate,” when you have put the limit on it. And you know that it is simply not true. At least the Chief Minister has got the grace to laugh now. She knows that she has been a little caught out.
So the problem is that the Chief Minister said we would have a new era of transparency, we would have a new era of participation and we would have a new era of collaboration. The only problem for her new era is that, of course, it does not extend to the opposition and it does not extend to the people of the ACT because they do not have the full data, which Mr Barr keeps clutched very closely to his chest, on the impact of the rates reforms. We do not have the knowledge of what will happen with the ACTEW dividend and we do not have the full knowledge of what the true cost of capital metro is.
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