Page 1935 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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another media release, this one trumpeted as “freeing the ACT from dependence on land revenue”. Some liberation.
In doublespeak, we are being told by the government that this is a tough budget—a courageous budget, according to the Chief Minister. It is no such thing. Instead it is a budget that bludgeons the whole community. It is in fact a desperate budget brought down by a desperate government. This is a budget that will fall particularly heavily on those who are on fixed incomes and on low incomes. It will impact on home owners, on first home buyers, on renters, on businesses, on people who are ill and on people with disabilities. It will impact on school children and their parents, on teachers and on other public servants. There is not a group in the community this budget will not affect for the worse.
How is it courageous to inflict financial pressure and worry, especially on some of the most vulnerable people in the community, and to take away services from those who need them? Yet this is what this government is doing. Yet it has the hide to call that action “courageous”. It would be courageous if the Chief Minister had said, “We have failed dismally. The decisions we have taken, and taken over the last 4½ years were wrong.” But that is not what he is saying. What the government is offering is its own black-and-white rationale for the draconian measures contained within this budget.
First up, let us look at the crisis that is not a crisis but strangely requires all the measures involved in dealing with crisis. The Chief Minister was at pains in his budget speech to tell us that we are not in a crisis. No? Outside, people are going about their daily business in Civic. “The sky has not fallen in,” he says. The crisis is in the decades ahead, and it is because this is such a forward-thinking government that it is dealing with this far-off event now.
But the government fails to mention that the reason why people are happily going about their business just beyond these walls has nothing to do with anything the ACT government has or has not done. It is to do with the booming economy vouchsafed for us by the excellent management of this country at the national level—an excellent management that has continued now for over a decade. It is this national prosperity that has ensured close to full employment in the ACT. This has had the effect to date of, indeed, “cotton-wooling” us here in the ACT from the effects of the Stanhope government’s phenomenal incompetence.
The government says we are not in crisis. But if we are not in crisis now, why are 39 schools and preschools being closed? If we are not in crisis now, why are 500 public servants to lose their jobs in the next year? If we are not in crisis now, why is business being gutted? If we are not in crisis, why was our major public hospital, Canberra Hospital, on bypass; that is, ambulances were directed that they could deliver no patients every second day last month? And if we are not in crisis, why are we getting nine taxes, including two totally new ones?
In its own doublespeak, the government claims to be taking the hard decisions to deal with a narrow revenue base. It does not tell you that it has squandered the GST money which is the mechanism by which the commonwealth government compensates the ACT government for having a narrow revenue base—GST money which, when we first got it, was around the $350 million mark, which is now well over $700 million and which, in
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