Page 1652 - Week 08 - Thursday, 28 September 1989
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pressure of public opinion this time, but has warned us that it might feel obliged to avoid it altogether next time.
This remains then, to all intents and purposes anyway, the same budget that Ms Follett presented to the Assembly before in draft. The Government may have tinkered at the margins and spelt out a few more things than before, but it has continued with the same headstrong attitude towards the ideas of others. "This is our budget", the Government has said, "and we will listen to public comments but we will not hear them".
So be it. This is the Government's budget and Government members will have to live with it. They will have to live with the fact that their budget stands or falls on highly questionable estimates of future economic performance over the next year. They will have to live with their faith in the Commonwealth's ability to sort out national problems and they will have to live with the results of putting their trust in the same Commonwealth Government to treat the ACT fairly in establishing the financial circumstances for self-government.
The level of debt and potential debt in the ACT is looming as a problem for this Government. It claims to have identified, for example, a notional indebtedness to the Commonwealth of $285m, an amount which would be paid off over 138 years. Another concept of debt which is accepted by world financial institutions, including the OECD, is that governments drawing on the reserves of their own statutory authorities are actually borrowing.
This budget imposes for the first time a dividend on ACTEW of some $5m. The idea of a dividend, Mr Speaker, is no more than a shallow device to avoid being seen as a borrower. So too is the demand placed on the Gaming and Liquor Authority for $2m. In other words, the Government's borrowings are far more than they are prepared to admit.
We welcome the effort to cut the proposed $62m borrowings by $10.8m. Even so, the Rally identified the $67.7m reserves set aside for payment to the Commonwealth for serviced land taken over on 1 July 1988 as a supposed debt which demands renegotiation. We attempted to point this out to the Government in our pre-budget submission, but like many other voices in the community ours too has been ignored.
I can only say to the Government once again that it must confront the Commonwealth and demand on behalf of the people of Canberra a much better deal. The other members of the Rally team will deal in due course with the Government's failure to tackle revenue measures such as betterment and the failure to address the ACT forestry issue with any financial logic. The ACT forests have large amounts of capital tied up in their management and produce an embarrassingly low return.
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