Page 2337 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 12 August 2014
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There might be a master plan beyond that. Perhaps it is because the minister is now also the Minister for Housing, and Northbourne Avenue is in his scope. Add to the public housing on Northbourne Avenue that may or may not become vacant, Macarthur House and some of the other buildings that the government have an interest in on Northbourne Avenue, and perhaps they hope to reap some extra value there. But it is very hard to see from this document in particular that the government actually has an agenda or a plan.
You only need to look at the level of debt that just seems to grow. It is $4.7 billion by the end of the budget outyears. You have to dig through some of the documents to actually find that figure. Indeed, when I asked officials what was the level of government debt at the end of the period, they actually had to take it on notice. No-one knew. And that concerns me. It means the controls are not there. One of the first questions cabinet should have asked was: at the end of the period, what is the debt? But clearly nobody did, because the Treasurer could not tell us and the officials could not tell us when we asked that question. They took it on notice.
We have this problem of debt going through the roof, as Mr Coe so eloquently pointed out this morning when we dealt with ACTEW. There is no plan to pay it back. So we have got temporary deficits, we have got a Treasurer with his fingers crossed and his eyes shut because it is going to return to normal—the glory days are returning, according to the Treasurer—and the debt will somehow magically be repaid or we will simply carry it because we have got the ability to pay the interest. (Second speaking period taken.) And that is the problem for the people of the ACT.
In government responses to things like the estimates report, we are constantly told, “It is in the budget documents.” If you cannot actually point it out in detail in an answer to a committee report, then you cannot do your job. You are not doing your job. The problem is that, as always, the people get to pay. I think that is the sadness of this.
Again, we go back to things like the lease variation charge and extension of time. Indeed, the lease variation charge is a failure as a tax. And yet again it does not achieve the intended result. The lease variation charge was to achieve $17.6 million in the year just finished. It got to $15.2 million. The budget for 2014-15 has it drop to $14½ million. I think if members go back to when the charge was first put in place, for the current financial year something like $26 million or $28 million worth of revenue was expected from this magic tax.
Andrew Barr’s tax was going to have no impact on the market. It was the perfect tax. It was not going to affect development, was not going to affect rent, was not going to affect sale prices, and the government was going to reap a motza. The government has not reaped the motza. It has not come. It has affected sale prices. It is affecting densification and is affecting the way that this city operates. And it is another piece of failed tax reform from this government. It is the same with the extension of time fees. They got it wrong but they cannot say, “We have got it wrong and we will go back and review it.”
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