Page 2133 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
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The Chief Minister replied:
Whereabouts are these details?
I said:
They are scattered throughout the budget. If you go … to page 68 of budget paper 4 …
And on it goes. I asked whether he could provide the list for all the contingencies in the budget. He replied:
Yes, we are happy to do that.
I am sure he is happy to do it and it will be interesting to find out when it actually appears.
Even though there is a lot of money in the budget and there is a lot of money for capital works, there is not a whole lot of detail on how it will be delivered. You only have to go back to the record of this government and their inability to deliver capital works on time and on budget and within the parameters set to see that what you have here is a sham. It is a nice number. “We are going to put in a billion dollars and, with what is in the basket, we have already got there $1.4 billion over the coming years.” But the question is about the ability to genuinely deliver this money. You really have to question whether the government are serious about their commitment to make this happen.
What we have seen is a litany of projects that came from the former government. They date back to 2001. There are things like the link project, the glassworks, the step-down facility at Calvary Hospital, the Gungahlin Drive extension and a whole list of new projects that have been botched since this government have been in office. If they cannot answer the questions about what the money is for then I do not think we have got much hope of them getting the ability to be actually able to deliver it.
I note the changes to the ACT’s payroll tax system. They are great. We commend those changes to the Chief Minister. Unfortunately, like so much this government has delivered, they are six years late. This is the path that the previous government stepped along. It should have come into force on 30 June 2002, but here it is coming in on 1 July 2008. And that is a shame.
I think a more fundamental, a more important, question is: how aligned is the ACT’s payroll tax regime to the regime in New South Wales? There should be a principle, which we often operate on, that we should seem to have regulations between the ACT and New South Wales as equivalent as possible, unless there was a clearly defined reason, a specific objective, where one would differ from that. I guess the question is: what is the objective here? What is it they are seeking to achieve and where will it go from here? Again, you do not get the sense of a plan by this government that they have actually any idea whatsoever about where this is going.
In the area of housing affordability, there have to be, and there still remain, very significant questions about the government’s much-vaunted housing affordability plan.
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