Page 3011 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 17 October 2007
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recognises that the best spenders of people’s money are those people themselves, not governments that are constantly wrenching dollars out of their pockets. We differentiate ourselves very clearly on this issue in the ACT.
The June quarterly accounts showed a $90 million turnaround on the outcomes in ACT revenues, and the opposition made it very clear that we believe the additional funds should, in some part at least, be made available to the people of Canberra by way of tax reductions. They were told that the painful charges and taxes that came in in last year’s budget were necessary because of the cost of services. We could not continue to deliver services at this level, Mr Stanhope said. People were expected to accept that with complete gullibility and buy the story that the territory, to function, to provide roads and hospitals and police could not operate without all of that extra money. Well, Mr Deputy Speaker, they were wrong. Mr Stanhope was wrong. His forecasting was wrong, and his forecasting has been wrong on every single budget that I have debated since being elected here in 2004.
You can live with a mistake here and there, but how can you be consistently wrong, consistently underestimating the taxation and therefore using that as a justification to put in more taxes and then, when your mistakes are constantly now a matter of public record, sit there and say “We’re not going to pass back tax reductions to the people of Canberra”? It is a situation that I find indefensible. I find it quite shameful.
But we are not talking about giving money away here to a group of privileged people at the top end of the social scale. We are talking about ordinary people in Canberra. I have mentioned before that in this last period of holidays I heard the Chief Minister on talkback radio. He was really struggling to explain to a caller who came in and said, “My pension hasn’t moved. Because of the low consumer price index my pension hasn’t moved, but you, of course, have increased my charges.” On top of that, they use a mechanism called the wage price index which means that your rate of charges are going up influenced by the overall average wages in the community, and in a city with the highest salaried people in Australia that will drive the wage price index up at a rate much greater than the CPI.
Now, I know that people on substantial six-figure incomes might say, “Well, who cares about $130 here and there?” But if you are a person on a fixed income, if you are a family, particularly a single income family that is battling and struggling to make ends meet, all of these little outlays become quite significant. It may be the difference between them doing something with their children that they would like to do, something as simple as going out and getting them a bit of takeaway food on a Friday night. These are things that are important to ordinary people in Canberra, but not to this government. This government is saying, “We have made another windfall gain out of the tax regime. So what are we going to do? We are going to bring in another appropriation bill. When the ink is barely dry on the last budget, we are going to bring in another appropriation bill. We are going to spend more of your money.” Why are they going to do it? Because they figure it is better for them to splash the cash around the city and spend it on programs that they can control in the best hope of rescuing this ailing government before the next election.
But the fact of the matter is that people are not as silly as this government would suggest. I think most people in this territory are becoming tired of poor management.
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