Page 2608 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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to do with the budget. I then got exactly the same answer back from the Chief Minister, saying it has nothing to do with the budget. Again, there is a contradiction. Yes, the economic white paper, the social plan and the Canberra plan are the underlying foundations of what this government is doing. But somehow they are sort of eerily detached from reality because they actually have no impact on the budget. It is quite interesting in that regard.
The Chief Minister said we have to wean ourselves off land sales. It is curious that he said that, in the longer term, we have an ever-decreasing proportion of revenue available from land sales. Yet the overwhelming revenue increases are all land based. They are land-based taxes and charges. They are on your property; they are on the value of the land you hold; all we are doing is transferring it. They say, “Gee, there is not going to be enough land to sell in the future to balance our budget, so we will just up the taxes.” It is still land-based. It shows that there is no strategy in this at all. There is no way in which the government can say that they have a strategy here and that they are moving on with it.
The issue of the functional review is large in this. The functional review is the guiding document, yet the functional review is not there to be seen. The functional review could be a blank document, for all we know. There could be nothing in it or there could be lots in it. It could be erroneous—it could be wrong. None of us knows. All have been denied access to this holy grail, this font of wisdom that has dictated all these changes that have occurred. We do not know which recommendations the government has accepted and which they have not. We do not know why they accepted and why they did not. As others have made quite clear, the problem here is that, unless we can look at this budget in the context in which it was framed, then we have difficulties.
Again the communications unit has come up. It is interesting that the Chief Minister, before his election in 2001, promised no bread and circuses. He promised no media stunts. His was going to be a serious government, yet the communications unit just grows and grows. We are cutting 39 schools out of the budget, but we are going to give the Chief Minister’s personal communications unit more resources to sell the message of the Chief Minister. If he is failing that badly to sell his message, then a little bit of extra money is not going to help. That money should go back into essential services, whether it be an extra police officer, an extra nurse, an extra teacher or some surgery that should occur.
I note that the government’s response to many of the recommendations of the committee are in the main totally inadequate. The majority of them are simply not answered; about 30 are simply noted; 10 have no recommendations—so they are either an answer or a commentary—and some are agreed in part. The curious thing is the acknowledgment of the poor behaviour of Minister Hargreaves.
The first three recommendations are regarding the behaviour and responsibility of ministers, which in the main were aimed at Mr Hargreaves. The government has noted them. It has not defended them. It has not agreed to them. It has said: yes, fair cop. He did not do his job. He has not behaved. He has not explained. The Chief Minister needs to make sure that ministers are responsible for what they do.
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