Page 1567 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 27 September 1989
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The fact is that we do not know anything about our public debt. The fact is, Mr Deputy Speaker, that the Government does not know anything about what our public debt is. We need to know it and the only way we are going to find out is to have an independent audit carried out on the assets that we inherited from the Commonwealth on self-government day. As the Chief Minister rightly pointed out in her budget speech, we need to know what condition those assets are in so that we can know whether they are really assets or whether they are just rubbish.
Finally, Mr Deputy Speaker, we do need to know what the public debt really is, what it relates to, and how much it is going to cost this community in future years. Unless you know that, how can you enter into increasing public debt by way of continuing borrowings from year to year? I submit that we are in a very delicate situation. It is a very large part of our budget, nearly $100m in debt servicing charges per year alone, about one-twelfth of our budget, and we do not even know what we are paying it for.
I think that it is a matter that the Chief Minister should have taken up long before this. It should not have to be brought to her attention by me or by any other member of this Assembly. The information should have been there, it should have been in the budget and, if she does not have the resources to determine this information for herself, then she will support this motion that we get an independent auditor to come in, do the work for us, and satisfy us on what our true financial position really is.
MR COLLAERY (4.57): I wish to add a few remarks to support the motion moved by my colleague Mr Kaine. In the four minutes available to me I would like to point out that in the much-vaunted policies which the Deputy Chief Minister has now finally conceded that the Rally has, which he said we did not have, the Rally has long supported this motion and has said in its original policies that in government the Rally will immediately instruct the ACT Treasury to present an itemised inventory of ACT government property assets.
Mr Kaine essentially said it all. He indicated, and the Rally agrees, that the inventory would be a primary determinant of a number of issues, including our revenue base. Interestingly, Mr Deputy Speaker, the matters that would be involved in that bringing forward of an inventory would include an independent audit, which in itself is something that one would have thought should have been a preliminary piece of work before the Government brought down this budget. Really we have in the supplementary documentation to the budget all of the supposition that could have been dealt with by that independent audit which the Rally indicated in its finance policy, and which the Labor Party had to hand from 11 May or earlier, was a necessary prerequisite to a proper arrangement. That, of course, is something that we might be approaching in due course.
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