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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2269 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

is not a direct subsidy to the developer-it is a direct subsidy to the person purchasing the property. That does not seem to me to be a fair policy.

I would like the Treasurer to explain, perhaps when he responds in this section of the appropriation debate, why are we extending a waiver to people who have already purchased properties. If the waiver is meant to be an incentive, why are we providing an incentive to people who have already made a decision to purchase, and who have entered into a contract of sale to do so? It does not seem to make sense. It does not seem in any way to fit into the framework of providing an incentive for purchase. I believe that it is targeted in a way that benefits only those relatively wealthy people who are capable of purchasing an inner-city unit worth more than a quarter of a million dollars.

MR HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (4.21): Mr Deputy Speaker, I want to address some of the comments that have been made in the debate on this line of appropriation. First of all, I refer to the comments made by Mr Quinlan on a number of aspects of the budget. Mr Quinlan has again returned to this issue of the $349 million operating loss that we inherited on coming into government. Mr Quinlan returns to that issue very frequently. The issue seems to be a bit of burr under the saddle for Mr Quinlan and he seems to want to keep coming back to scratch it.

Mr Quinlan: Because it is an untruth.

MR HUMPHRIES: No it is not an untruth. The Auditor-General made it perfectly clear, without qualification, that this was the operating loss for the 1995-96 financial year. What Mr Quinlan seems to be suggesting-he is not quite articulating it fully-is that some unspecified much better operating result was occurring in the ACT fiscus before the Liberal Party came to power in 1995.

Mr Quinlan: It is $200 million worse than your own budget for that year.

MR HUMPHRIES: Come on, just listen to what I am saying. The suggestion is that there was going to be some terribly good result in the time before the Liberal Party came to office. When we take a snap shot of the first full financial year of the Carnell government, what do we find? We find a $349 million operating loss-a lack of this amount of money; whatever you want to call it. The suggestion that Mr Quinlan is making, without being very specific about it, is that the Labor government was operating on a very good basis. Something happened, something went wrong between March 1995 and the 1995-96 financial year to generate this worse result. He says, "That was your result, not our result. That was the Liberal Party's work, not the Labor Party's work."

I ask members who are in the chamber and perhaps interested observing citizens of the ACT who are in the public gallery to cast their minds back to the first budget of the Carnell government which was delivered in the middle of 1995. That budget contained measures to reduce the size of the ACT public sector. Labor objected to that. It introduced measures to increase revenue in the ACT. It introduced new taxes, and increases in taxation. Labor objected to that, too. It contained a number of social measures, but principally it was concerned overall with improving the bottom line for the territory, about improving the operating loss.

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