Page 1464 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 14 May 2014
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
The budget identifies 16½ thousand APS jobs to go over the next four years. Job reductions will be made through targeted cuts and efficiency dividends in each portfolio. About 4½ thousand jobs are expected to go in the 2014-15 financial year and for the ACT in that year alone we have been asked to carry the burden of about 50 per cent of those job losses, with 2,000 of them expected to come from Canberra. This is around a one per cent reduction in current employment levels in the territory.
The job losses are one of the impacts of the federal budget last night. The other impact is the reductions in programs and services that have been flowing through our agreements with the commonwealth. The third area of impact is around the taxation changes, of which the ACT will share a disproportionate burden to the rest of Australia. The fourth area is in relation to the infrastructure spend that occurred around the rest of the country, indeed in every other single jurisdiction, except in the ACT. So there are probably four main areas.
The second thing I would say is that it is going to have an impact on our own budget. We are currently working through the detail of that and we will do that over the next week or so.
MADAM SPEAKER: Supplementary question, Dr Bourke.
DR BOURKE: Chief Minister, are there any particular areas of service delivery in the ACT which will be affected?
MS GALLAGHER: I thank Dr Bourke for the supplementary. The federal budget will have significant impacts on service delivery here in the ACT. We are trying to work through many hundreds of pages and the financial tables contained in the detail that has been released.
We do know that essentially the national healthcare reforms have been torn up. That agreement does not exist. They have walked away from activity-based funding, from the funding guarantee and from a fairer share of funding into the future, which was part of, and central to, the reforms as they were signed up to several years ago. So that is a big problem.
I note the silence from the opposition. Every other Liberal party in the country is screaming about this from the rooftop. All the premiers are out today. All of them are aware that they have a massive hole in their budgets that was created last night—a massive one. They are criticising the federal government for it, but the gang of Abbott apologists over there remain silent and have nothing to say about a federal budget that—
Mr Hanson interjecting—
MS GALLAGHER: To all intents and purposes, it did not happen last night! Nobody saw it! Nothing to say! Nothing to say! Didn’t see it! No impact! It is just to absolutely ignore and pretend that this will go away. Well, it will not.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video