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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1603 ..

MR QUINLAN (4.23): Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I did not even notice this response coming from the government but I am happy to reply There are a couple of things that I would like to address, but not necessarily in the same order that the Chief Minister mentioned them. I am glad that she brought up this claim that this government has turned around the budget position from $344 million to a balanced budget. That $344 million bottom line includes a $91 million abnormal superannuation adjustment.

Ms Carnell: So the Auditor-General got it wrong, did he?

MR QUINLAN: Thanks for the interjection. I have spoken to the Auditor-General in regard to these figures. It is to be remembered that these figures that created $344 million were not in fact an annual report; they were a back-cast. They were purely reference figures in the budget of the following year. The Auditor-General will tell you. He will say, "Well, what do you think?" The Auditor-General has indicated to me that he rather thinks that some of those figures were rather ropy. If you happen to be a Carnell government that wished, quite obviously, from day one to thrive on propaganda and you are going to back-cast the previous year to give the reference point as your starting point, what do you do? You scrape the barrel You dig up every last little provision, every write-off, every write-down you can cram into it to create the worst possible position and that, I assert, is what this government did.

We have debated this point in this house before but the government still persists in saying, "No, it was $344 million. That was the position we took over." Well, that is not a true reflection of the case. To some extent I am glad to see the government keep using it because it does show that they continue to use this sort of misleading information in the public forum, despite the fact that they know it is misleading.

During the last financial year we have received a review of the superannuation liability. Guess what. It was overstated. It was overstated by something like $240 million or $250 million, about the figure that I recall challenging the government with during the ACTEW debate. During the ACTEW debate the misinformation trail told us that the superannuation liability was going to kill the territory.

Mr Stanhope: Do you remember when you were going to flog it?

MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Hird): Order! The Leader of the Opposition will come to order. Mr Quinlan has the call.

MR QUINLAN: Thank you. This year, factored into this budget for the first time, is a swing the other way. There has been the surprising discovery that this disastrous superannuation liability is not quite as bad as it had been painted. This year we have decided that the best way to use that is to write it off over 12 years, using an American accounting standard. We will put it above the line and we will give our result a $21 million bonus, an addition. In fact, if you did not have that treatment in there, if you had treated it the same way as you treated it in your back-casting of 1995-1996, you would have a deficit in this budget today.

Mr Stanhope: Different standards, is it?

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