Page 1566 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 27 September 1989
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responsible for our economic and financial situation because it gave us some run-down assets.
It is imperative also that we know the details of our public debt: how big is the debt bill; what assets does it relate to; and what is the annual interest bill? One would have thought, Mr Deputy Speaker, that these were matters of such importance that we would have been enlightened in the budget, but what are the facts in the budget? All we are told in the budget is that there is a provision for $91m approximately to be paid from the consolidated fund by way of debt servicing. That is $91m, a very large sum, but what does it relate to? One might also point out that this compares with a similar payment last year of only around $50m. There has been an 80 per cent increase in the servicing cost of our public debt from last year to this year.
Incidentally, when the Chief Minister brought down her initial budget statement only eight or nine weeks ago, the figure there was put at just over $82m, so over a period of about nine weeks it has grown from $82m approximately to $91m, a growth of $9m over the last eight to ten weeks. So it is obviously a very rubbery figure. Just what is the cost of servicing our public debt?
In addition to that $91m that is shown as being a payment from the consolidated revenue fund, there are two other references to debt servicing in the budget. The first is on page 60 of budget paper No. 4, where ACTEW has provision for debt servicing of over $17m, and that of course is in addition to that shown in the consolidated fund.
There is also reference at page 10 of budget paper No. 8 to an amount of $10.9m debt servicing from the municipal debt. It seems to me that that may or may not be subsumed in the original $91m, but there is no explanation that that is so. So we really have no idea exactly what the debt servicing cost in this year is, let alone anything about the assets to which it relates. So I think that there is a great need for some work to be done to find out what our debt really is.
The debt itself is quite a fascinating subject, because if you try to find out what the public debt is, the only reference to it is on page 23 of budget paper No. 7. It is described as being "the historical notional debt calculated using a hypothetical model", and on the basis of some historical notional debt calculated using a hypothetical model the debt is set down at 1 July 1989 at a figure of around $285m, but what does the figure mean? Nowhere in the budget papers is there any indication of what the $285m represents, and when you learn that it is an historical notional debt calculated using a hypothetical model, you really have to ask: does anybody know just what the public debt is that we individually as taxpayers and ratepayers are responsible for?
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