Page 1151 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 22 August 1989
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I must comment also on the Federal Government's commitment to the ACT, prior to the granting of self-government, to maintain real levels of financial assistance to the ACT. The Chief Minister keeps defending the Commonwealth Government on this matter, and I think she is wrong to do so. Simply put, the Commonwealth has not stood up to its promise to maintain its real terms expenditure in this Territory. It has reneged on its promise, and it is using the establishment of its so-called special trust fund of $22.7m to obscure the fact. To date I have seen no clear evidence that these moneys or any part of them will actually be made available for use by the ACT Government.
I note the Chief Minister has written to the Prime Minister, but I cannot think of any reason why the Prime Minister would abdicate from his earlier position that they are going to stay in a hollow log and that we are not going to get them. In addition to this $22.7m that the Prime Minister and the Federal Treasurer have stuck in their hollow log, there is an amount in our budget of $67.7m which has been assessed as payable by the ACT to the Commonwealth as the amount owing for fully serviced and partially serviced land transferred to this Territory.
The Commonwealth has arbitrarily deducted this amount from the 1989-90 payments to be made to the ACT. In other words, it has already taken the dough. This simply is not acceptable. At best, you could argue that the money should be payable to the Commonwealth only at the time that the land to which it relates is actually sold - and I will guarantee that most of it has not yet been sold. It should not be taken from the ACT without negotiation and agreement - and I have no knowledge of any negotiation or agreement on the subject - nor should it be taken in one lump sum. There is simply no justification for the Commonwealth to do that arbitrarily.
I understand that the amount is rather elusive, having increased from a figure of about $50m in April to a round figure of $68m on 25 July of this year. That is an average growth of half a million dollars a week. What are we talking about? Why is the Commonwealth arbitrarily and unilaterally deciding to stick this money in its own piggy bank? Furthermore, I understand that there is interest accumulating on this, and interest on $68m is a lot of money.
Such a debt, if it were sustained in this fiscal year, has the potential for a major dislocation of the ACT's financial stability, just at a time when we need to be adjusting for the withdrawal by the Commonwealth of its extra support 18 months or so downstream from that. The Chief Minister is very serene about this. She says, "No problem at all. We don't have to change our budget".
The Federal Government seems determined to victimise the ACT financially, despite its previous undertakings. Yet, apart from a token objection at the Premiers Conference, our
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