Page 1642 - Week 05 - Thursday, 8 May 2008
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This blow-out from the budgeted level has been particularly pronounced in certain areas. I have already spoken about the blow-out in the number of staff employed in the Chief Minister’s Department, which increased its staffing level this year by a massive 33.8 per cent.
There were also large increases in staffing levels at Actew Corporation, which increased its staffing level by 41.7 per cent, and the Land Development Agency, which increased its staffing level by 41.5 per cent. These increases in the ACT public sector make a mockery of the government’s previous claims that it would cut the ACT bureaucracy.
At a time when Prime Minister Rudd is saying that he will take a meataxe to the commonwealth public service, the Australian public service, we have an ACT government that is allowing its bureaucracy to expand substantially. Despite the blow-outs in this year’s staffing levels in the ACT government, there are still more increases budgeted for the 2008-09 financial year. In this coming year, the ACT government is budgeted to grow by another 379 full-time equivalent staff, an increase of about 2.45 per cent. Again, this level of growth exceeds population growth so that a higher proportion of our residents will be employed in the ACT bureaucracy instead of being employed in productive enterprises.
The result of this high-spending budget and the growth in the ACT bureaucracy is that the ACT government is again budgeted to go back into deficit in the 2008-09 financial year. What was that I said: deficit? Surely not, for we have been hearing about the great surplus achieved, the great $84.9 million surplus. This is, of course, just a clever device by the Chief Minister. When he talks about this alleged $84.9 million surplus, he is referring to the net operating balance of the government, including expected long-term gains on superannuation assets. It is quite misleading to include such expected gains in calculating the budget bottom line. These superannuation assets are set aside for ACT public servants; it is their money, not the government’s, and these assets cannot be used to support government spending.
The real operating result for the ACT government, excluding the assets of its employees, is in fact a deficit of $5.6 million, with a further deficit of $188 million accumulating in the forward years. In other words, the alleged surplus is all smoke and mirrors, designed to obscure the fact that the government is budgeted to run at an operating loss in the coming financial year.
Members of this Assembly may recall that we had this exact same debate in the Assembly in last year’s budget, when the Chief Minister attempted to pass off a $13 million surplus as a $103 million surplus. When I raised this with the former federal Treasurer one day at around the time of our last budget, he just said to me very simply, “We could never get away with that in the federal government; we could never get away with it.” I said, “Well, they get away with it in the ACT because they don’t seem to get the level of examination on these economic matters that they should.”
That debate culminated in an article in the Canberra Times by Emeritus Professor Allan Barton, a professor of accounting at the Australian National
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