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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 1938 ..

MR SPEAKER: Mr Moore, is this the Auditor-General or tourism that you are discussing?

MR MOORE: Mr Speaker, this is about the Auditor-General. I am referring to the Auditor-General's report. Do not forget, Mr Speaker, that we also agreed to address the response to the Estimates Committee report. What I am intending to do is make a fairly broad conceptual speech at this stage and then, as I go on, I will be able to speak in much more specific terms.

MR SPEAKER: That is understood.

MR MOORE: But I think these underlying issues are very important. We still have throughout this budget the problem that the budget is not sustainable. Wherever we go, wherever we look for more money, wherever we think we should retain expenditure - whether it is on health, education or whatever - we are very conscious that we have this problem. The Auditor-General, in dealing with these issues, re-emphasises, as he does again and again in a series of reports, that we cannot ignore the amount of funding that goes on education and health and that we should be looking at cutting those. That is very interesting. We have managed to maintain the education funding and increased health funding significantly. We have these kinds of pressures still there.

Mr Speaker, I think it is very important that we do look at revenue raising. There are some very sensible ways of going about it. It is no good just looking after a few businesses in the ACT by allowing them to avoid paying payroll tax, thus avoiding their responsibility. It is fair to say that the Chief Minister, in her response, said that there are some structural taxation problems. I agree that is the case. That is why it is that I accept the moves federally and amongst all the States and Territories to look at the taxation system. Taxation reform does not mean just saying that we will have a GST; taxation reform means looking at where States are able to tax and where they are not, compared to the Federal Government. I think there are some very important issues there.

Just think, Mr Speaker, if we actually had control over income tax and the Federal Government had control over other taxation systems. Then we would be in a far better position than almost any other State or Territory because we pay so much more in income tax than we wind up getting back. I do not think that opportunity should be missed. I think, even in negotiations over tax reform, we should be keeping that in mind and pushing for how we can best help the Territory. In the meantime, there is this underlying problem with the budget that we do not have a sustainable system of maintaining our budget. We need one, and we must have the kind of leadership that will take us through to a sustainable budget. I shall come back to this issue as we go through the budget in more detail, Mr Speaker.

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (11.45): Mr Speaker, I just want to answer some of the questions that Mr Moore put forward. I think in many ways Mr Moore was making a statement about the current operating loss that the ACT has. I think one of the things Mr Moore did not acknowledge is that in the budget the ACT Government has actually reduced the operating loss this year, compared to what our forward estimates were. The operating loss that we project for this year will be somewhat less than we anticipated it was going to be.

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