Page 1089 - Week 06 - Thursday, 27 July 1989
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Mr Speaker, one thought comes to mind immediately to many of us who have to try to park in this city: How much is the Commonwealth paying us for occupying free parking spaces on Territory land all around the city? If we are to have flying squads of more than 60 strike teams of parking inspectors, how about letting them loose on the Commonwealth cars and let the Commonwealth feed the meters if we have to bear that cost? Mr Speaker, one can give a number of other examples of the failure of the Chief Minister in this budget to take stock of how much the Commonwealth should be starting to pay us for its use of our Territory.
There is another major factor missed in the preamble to the budget, and that is the non-recovery of infrastructure costs. This must be the only place where, when a drunk driver knocks down a lamppost, he does not have to pay for it. Any of us who have been in practice in New South Wales and other States know that the client also gets the bill from the council for the damage the car does to council property and main roads facilities where the malefactor can be identified. Mr Speaker, that is a long-running issue in this Territory, and I challenge the Chief Minister to ask her staff what they think about the fact that we are continuing to fail to recover a whole range of costs that should be recovered out of damage and losses to Territory assets.
I will make a further comment in relation to the preamble because my colleagues will deal with some other matters in detail, from the community point of view. Mr Speaker, the Government seems to believe that you have to borrow to be a government, to be grown up. So the Government intends again to borrow for capital works. If ACTEW, for example, has got a little nest egg of some considerable sums, millions and millions, and if it can be levied, as it was recently, for a sum in the millions category, then why cannot those capital assets held by that authority be released to service our other capital works and not kept by it as a nest egg? Why do we have to pay that $6m to $7m interest on borrowings?
The recurrent budget also indicates that we have gone to a draft and pilot budget situation without having Mrs Grassby's promised housing review. The review should contain a definitive statement as to what this Government intends to do, by way of refinancing, in the mortgage belt and also whether the Minister for Housing and Urban Services, amongst other things, will adopt a progressive equity purchase scheme propounded by the Rally and mentioned in our Supply Bill debate some weeks ago.
As my colleague Mr Kaine indicated, you have to go to the forward estimates to try to work out some of these things, but they are still not clear. The forward estimates seem to show that the amounts estimated to come in from the housing area generally are around $17m on average per annum for the next three years, with a sum approaching $2m to $3m
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