Page 2880 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 August 2013
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back with, they will do the personal invective, the constant interjections here, trying to cast insinuations.
The reality is that the Chief Minister signed up too early. She signed up without doing the necessary work. As a result, what we are seeing comparative to other jurisdictions is that the ACT has missed out potentially on millions of dollars. That is millions of dollars that we could have seen put towards nurses’ wages, pay off the deficit—whatever it might be.
It appears to me that this is a government that has a track record on this. If you remember Kevin Rudd’s health reforms, it was Jon Stanhope and Katy Gallagher who signed up to that in an instant, and then Jon Stanhope said, “Let’s go to the bar.” In this case what we saw was Julia Gillard, about to be knifed by Kevin Rudd, desperately needing some wins, and she went to her sister in the ACT and said, “I need some help. I’m about to be rolled by Kevin, and I need some political wins.” And what you saw was the territory sign up like that. We know that the consequence of that negotiation was that we are $30 million out of pocket. That is a very poor result for the ACT.
Turning to some of the Treasury issues, there are some genuine concerns that we all have about the levels of debt and deficit that we are seeing in this budget. The borrowings, including territory-owned corporations, are at $2.7 billion, or nearly 70 per cent of the total budget, and that is going up to $3.5 billion. The recommendation out of the review was:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government address the underlying deficit as a matter of priority.
That has been spun by Mr Barr as, “The Liberals are going to cut,” and so on. You see what Kevin Rudd is doing federally. It is the same sort of narrative. I am surprised that Mr Barr has not come up here with a jar of Vegemite as well, saying that somehow the Liberals are going to increase the price of Vegemite, in just the way that Kevin Rudd is doing.
Let us be very clear. What we want to see are deficits reduced and that the debt is being taken seriously. But what we are seeing from this government is the exact opposite of that. I have talked before about the structural deficits. When you take away the effect of the superannuation account, you see that this government is getting a billion dollars in extra revenue but is spending $668 million on top of that. That is not putting the territory in a good position for the future.
The other issue that has also been well canvassed in this place is that of rates. It is the biggest tax reform in the territory’s history, according to Andrew Barr. We covered this in some detail during the vote on the no-confidence motion. This budget shows that rates are tripling in just over 11 years. The minister says he has done the modelling but is refusing to table it. For perhaps the 20th time I call on the minister to table the modelling that he says he has done but refuses to provide to the community.
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