Page 1330 - Week 05 - Thursday, 31 May 2007
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about this government’s economic management credentials it could be seen today when we were asking the question about pay parking at the hospital.
We found out today about the extraordinary situation where the government imposed pay parking at our hospitals, put a lot of people through a lot of grief, and actually lost money. Who knows of another government that has lost money on pay parking? If there is one thing that pay parking normally delivers to government it is a net return, a net positive gain. If you are going to put patients, relatives and others through the pain, the annoyance and the distress of having to pay for parking upfront—pay and display—you would expect to see a return. But this government has the extraordinary record of a pay parking system that lost money. That must be some sort of record—for a pay parking system to have lost money. And if you cannot run a pay parking system how can you run a health system; how can you run an education system? If you cannot run the little things and do the little things right, how do you go with the big things?
We have seen how this mob look at economic management. We are in a time of absolutely booming revenues. The Australian economy and the ACT economy are going gangbusters. We see record low unemployment. We see inflation under control. We see interest rates under control. And we see record revenues coming to the ACT government as a result. And what have they done with it?
As opposed to the federal government, which has paid off debt, lowered taxes and delivered more spending to crucial areas such as health, national security and infrastructure, what do we see here as a result of this government’s economic management. Last year we saw mass school closures and massive increases in rates and charges. At the end of this boom we see a government that has not planned for the future. At a time of drought, this most serious and pressing issue for the people of the ACT, and indeed the people of much of Australia, this government has not responded. So not only has this government had massive extra revenue coming in; it has also failed singularly to put in place the necessary infrastructure, whether it be road infrastructure or water infrastructure, to ready the ACT to deal with the challenges before it.
So let us compare the legacy of this government with that of the federal government. Pay parking is not normally seen as a spending measure, but under this government we have seen a net loss from pay parking at the hospital. So we can put that down as another spending measure that has gone wrong—$600,000 lost on pay parking; untold numbers of people annoyed and $600,000 net loss for the government.
We have seen this government simply waste money in so many areas—and a government that wastes money one year is going to keep doing it in the next year, and we have seen that with this government. We have seen it waste about $4 million on a busway—a busway that was dead, then alive and then dead again. We never know what is going to happen. The one thing we do know is that if it is ever built it will be a severe waste of money. It will be a $115 million-plus waste of money. Yet we have already seen $4 million wasted on this—$4 million apparently just to reserve a plot of land, we are now told.
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