Page 1965 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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The list goes on. I have pages of examples. I could keep going. I could commence with the words “if there is no crisis” for the next 12½ minutes, but I will not, because the people outside know that there is a crisis. There is a crisis in leadership, there is a crisis in the strategic direction of this government and there is a crisis in the ability of our Chief Minister to be Treasurer. It has been only through the ineptitude and budget mismanagement of Jon Stanhope and his ministers that we have been brought to this position. Public servants, community groups, ordinary Canberrans and businesspeople will now pay a price for this ineptitude and mismanagement through higher charges, reduced services, job cuts and opportunities lost.
It is great that the Chief Minister and Treasurer has come to join us, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker Gentleman, because now I can look him in the eye and tell him exactly that, through you. What we have, quite simply, is the lack of a coherent strategy from this government. What does the first budget delivered by Treasurer Stanhope tell us? It tells us quite simply that the Stanhope government has no economic strategy, has no coherent fiscal policy and has no strategy for community consultation. As the Chief Minister says when he says that there is no crisis, this is all occurring at a time when the ACT economy is officially booming. They say, “Count the cranes on the skyline.” All that counting the cranes on the skyline does is magnify the ineptitude and incompetence of Jon Stanhope.
If the Chief Minister continues to say that there is no crisis, why is all of this happening? If there is no crisis, why does he refuse to release information that has a major impact on the ACT community in the form of the Costello functional review of the ACT governance arrangements? I will tell you why he will not release it. It is because he is embarrassed by it, as it points out the level of ineptitude and mismanagement that Jon Stanhope has wrought upon the people of the ACT.
We see in this budget nothing but errors. You have only to look at the quality of the documents where the numbers do not add up. Indeed, this morning’s Canberra Times quite rightly pointed out that if you add up the numbers that are listed in the various pages of the Canberra Times—unfortunately, the Canberra Times missed the Rhodium figures, so its figures are slightly out—for what has been published you will see an increase of 499 in the number of public servants through this budget.
This Treasurer cannot even tell the difference between negative and minus. When you take the smaller number from the bigger number, Jon, it means that you have more, and that is what you have got by the numbers in your documents, 499 extra public servants. There is confusion because the health budget loses 82 public servants, but not according to the minister, who says, “We have programs that will give us more public servants. Nobody has been cut. If there were to be cuts, they would be coming from the non-service end, but we are not sure.” The problem with this budget is that nobody is sure why this is happening, nobody is sure why this has been wrought on us, except for the fact that the ineptitude and budget mismanagement of Jon Stanhope and his ministers have brought us to this position.
How do we fix it? When you are in a position like this you have to look at whom you can tax, what you can tax, which services you can cut and which services you have to increase. What we have had done is we have just had the entire forest clear-felled in this
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