Page 3391 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 14 November 2007
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Mr Mulcahy: It’s not $70 million.
MR STANHOPE: It is $70 million. Some $56 million for 100 acute care beds and $17 million for abolishing the utility tax—more than $70 million in two initiatives. I have got the list of all your other promises here. It adds up to well in excess of $150 million. You have promised explicitly as a party to reduce expenditures by over $150 million, and here you are cutting revenue. Here you are insisting, ad nauseam, that because we do not budget on a pure GFS basis it is not a pure surplus.
We see a bit of quiet walking away from this ideological purity around a pure GFS accounting standard. All of a sudden, that is abandoned. You will not hear any member of the Liberal Party today, as they seek to rip $17 million out of the territory’s coffers, mention ever again that the Liberal Party looks with disdain at the current method of determining a surplus within the ACT, a surplus which takes into account long-term average investment returns and takes into account some aspect of return for PLBA.
Mr Mulcahy will not admit publicly, because I do not think he has got the steel to do it, that he was wrong. He has abandoned this pure position in relation to pure GFS. It highlights the hypocrisy of the position that is being put today—the cheap politics of “We will offer you a little tax cut.” What are they offering in the abolition of the utilities tax? What is it per household per year? A few dollars. It is not even a pocket full of dollars. He would put to us the position that the people of Canberra would prefer to forgo the few dollars a week that this abolition would deliver rather than have the 3,500 inpatient services that $17 million provides in our hospitals. Mr Mulcahy would prefer to see us not invest more money in disability services, in mental health, in cancer support, in welfare officers in our schools, in climate change, in Indigenous drug and alcohol rehabilitation, in supporting the victims of sexual assault.
You cannot have it both ways. You cannot stand up today and say we are a high-taxing regime and we have got to cut taxes and the cost of that must be represented in service delivery and then not say which services you would cut. You cannot do it with any intellectual honesty or integrity. You cannot avoid the fact that your overarching philosophy is not the capacity for all of us to expect to receive services that would allow us to contribute to society, to reach our potential and to participate as full members of this society. Your philosophy is represented in the statements that your shadow treasurer made today, that tax cuts come before services. It is only after you have got rid of the tax cuts that you look to see—
Mr Pratt: You’re just jealous because you can’t deliver tax cuts.
MR STANHOPE: It is there in black and white. It was the most revealing interview that Mr Mulcahy has ever done, and it reflects the essential funding policy of the Liberal Party, if they ever achieve government. It also goes to their philosophy around the capacity to ensure that we are a genuinely inclusive, egalitarian society with a determination to give a fair go. It is reflected very much in the remarks made today by Mrs Burke:
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