Page 649 - Week 03 - Thursday, 15 March 2007
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prevented the 2006-07 budget deficit from occurring and avoided the need to increase taxes and other revenue raising measures.
The Chief Minister in his tabling speech for the 2006-07 budget, and again today, alluded to consecutive ACT governments, Labor and Liberal, spending beyond their capacity for the past 17 years. I have problems with both Liberal and Labor arguments. I note that the shadow Treasurer spoke as though the ACT is an economic island. I did not hear him talk about the federal budgetary context.
Mr Mulcahy: Yes I did. I said the GST—that it has all been dished out; that we are wasting it.
DR FOSKEY: In this sense there is a lot more than the GST involved. And the GST, of course, has become a political lever used by the federal government against the states and territories when it suits it.
The Treasurer said that the budgetary pressure the ACT government was facing had increased in urgency and something had to be done as soon as possible to fix it for the future. While I acknowledge that there was a problem in consecutive governments relying on land sales and superannuation, I and members of the public will never be sure how big that problem was. We will never be privy to this information because it was analysed within a secretive functional review.
If the situation really is, or was, so dire, I do not believe that the economic governance situation the ACT was facing could only have been a result of the last five years or only the fault of Labor. Surely it has to have been the result of the last 17 years, and perhaps even before that. It was a result of consecutive governments failing to think for the long term in a sustainable manner. We also have to realise that we started off with a stunning infrastructure funded through a federal government department. We can all see that the infrastructure, particularly pipes and drainage systems, is now ageing and calling out for attention, which I do not believe it is receiving in all cases, especially as we tax it more strongly by increasing urban density in some areas. We need only look at ActewAGL electricity poles, which are the subject of a renewal program which I believe is falling behind.
So this government does have a problem which should be brought to the attention of the whole community. But I do not think this problem was suddenly obvious the night the budget was announced. And I find it difficult to understand how the Stanhope government only came to this realisation within the last 18 months. If such a problem had been occurring for 17 years, why did it take consecutive governments 15½ years to realise it? But, finally, a government did acknowledge that there was a problem to address, and I think that we should take our hats off to the ACT government for that. Prior governments should have acknowledged the problem and taken action—and perhaps Mr Stanhope should have acknowledged the problems sooner and taken action sooner—but they did not and this only increased the mess that needed to be fixed.
So now there is a government that has acknowledged that its budget practices were not working, and it is the responsibility of this government to respond to the problem in the most appropriate way possible for the benefit of the community it serves; the
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