Page 1177 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 30 May 2007
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since it came to office back in 1996. After inheriting a massive debt, with servicing costs alone of $10 billion a year, a budget deficit and high unemployment and inflation, today’s Australian economy, delivered by the federal government’s careful economic management, is one of low and stable inflation, eliminated national debt, the lowest unemployment since the sixties and no fewer than 10 years of budget surpluses. That is an amazing achievement, and an even greater achievement when one considers what happened to the five Asian tigers in the Asian meltdown in 1997. That was hardly a blip on the Australian economic scene, thanks to the credibility and the competence of Howard and Costello.
The government has delivered a booming economy here in Australia, one that builds capacity, assures future prosperity, invests in infrastructure, protects our environment, and, despite what Dr Foskey might say, builds a skilful and healthy population and also secures our nation and its people. Importantly, the federal government’s economic management delivers direct benefits to individual Australians. It has delivered tax cuts and other benefits for families, ageing Australians, young people and rural Australians. And after all this, the federal government is still able to deliver a budget in surplus—$10.6 billion in surplus; a fine achievement!
Canberra and its people have been the beneficiaries of the Howard Liberal government’s responsible economic management. It has delivered to Canberra a buoyant economy, a growing share of GST revenue, almost full employment and real wage increases under WorkChoices. Like the federal government, the previous ACT Liberal government inherited a fiscal and economic nightmare from its predecessor Labor government. But careful economic management enabled the ACT Liberal government to hand over to this bunch of incompetents opposite a stable, buoyant economy and generous government coffers. It was a hell of a lot of hard work and a lot of sweat and pain.
What did the Stanhope Labor government do with this? It squandered it. It squandered the previous Liberal government’s legacy, and it squandered its land sale and GST fortunes too. I digress in relation to the GST. This government now gets over $800 million a year from GST. That is basically why we now have a budget of about $3 billion instead of the $2.1 billion we had in 2001.
When we first started getting the GST in we thought it was wonderful. One year we banked on getting in $47 million, which is about a 16th of what this lot get in now. Instead we got $80 million. That enabled us to make some major reforms like the K-2 school initiative, which I am pleased to see you increased to K-3, but it enabled us to make some significant reforms which continue to this day.
Those significant reforms were made with a fraction of the amount of money coming in that you lot have. After about four or five years of ensuring we got our budget back into surplus, which we did for the last three budgets, you lot have absolutely blown the lot. You have squandered the fortune so much that you have had to increase taxes and slash services to compensate for it.
In 2007-08 federal government payments for the ACT will increase by eight per cent over the previous year. That is more than twice the ACT’s wage price index increase
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