Page 2611 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 11 August 2015
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When this government cannot get enough revenue, they just go back and revalue your property and say, “Well, your property is clearly undervalued. We’ll up it.” I know of at least one business in Manuka that has taken them to court, and I know of several others that are considering their options. We have a Chief Minister and a party that is out of touch with real people and that do not understand what that increase in rates means to ordinary people, particularly those on fixed incomes and businesses.
The only way they can reduce their costs is to fire a staff member and work harder themselves. Mr Wall knows this; he has been in business. Mr Doszpot knows this; he has been in business. Mr Coe understands this. Mrs Jones understands it. Ms Lawder understands it. There are a lot of costs that small business particularly cannot get rid of. If you think you can increase your sales rapidly to pay Andrew Barr’s bill, you are fooling yourself.
The problem this compounds is the return to surplus. It is a fairytale. It is a nonsense. It is Wayne Swan-esque in its view that we are simply in 2018-19 going to return to surplus. If you look at the expense line on table 2.1.1 on page 29, you see that expenses this year went down $69 million. We are expected to believe that in the budget year 2016-17 they will go down a further $8 million—they will actually drop. Magically in 2017-18 they will go up $147 million and then up by $114 million the year after that, but, of course, we will have a surplus. It is on the never-never. It keeps drifting out because this minister cannot manage his budget and this government cannot control their spending.
We see it in the Treasurer’s advance where almost half the Treasurer’s advance was spent six days out from the end of the financial year. The Treasurer’s advance is for unexpected or urgent expenditure, and yet this government was spending money to supplement the police budget, which they gutted, and to pay for annual leave. How is annual leave unexpected? If you have not made the provisions properly you will get caught out, and this government gets caught out time and time again.
The economic adviser to the estimates committee, CIE—the Centre for International Economics—question the return to surplus and question a large number of the figures. In particular, they question the funding for capital works. Let us go back to the 2011 year where the government announced a $432 million office block. We had debate on that. We probably had the largest single hearing of a committee in the ACT with about 25 people at the table. They coughed up about 16 reports on that project, but for capital metro, they will not deliver up all the reports.
Times have changed. CIE has constantly stated there is not enough transparency in this government’s budget under this Treasurer. We know we have this provision for capital works, but it is unclear what the infrastructure investment provision really means. Indeed, when we got the briefing, there was disquiet amongst some of the committee members about what had been explained actually meant. We are now looking at something like $1.5 billion in capital provision, but there is no certainty on the cash flow of this provision, which CIE has also noted.
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