Page 217 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 December 2008
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made public. It has been kept secret. These are far-reaching, brutal budgetary measures based on a secret review. That this should happen in a jurisdiction where people expect openness and transparency, where we have a government that over and over has talked about commitment to openness and transparency, prompts us to ask: why has this been allowed to happen?
That is why we are moving this motion. We are moving this motion because the people of Canberra have suffered as a result of all of these decisions and suffered as a result of their schools being closed. They have seen services cut back. They have seen their taxes increase. They have seen a failure to deliver on all key service areas. The reason given is the secret review, the secret Costello review.
It is worth looking at how we got to the point that led to a secret review ending up in a horror budget. We saw the government squandering good times. We saw, between June 2002 and June 2004, the government turn a modest surplus of $12 million into a deficit of $291 million. We saw the government simply relying on the property boom. Even in these good times, they struggled to deliver surpluses. They relied on the property boom. They had $1.6 billion in additional revenue.
It must be said that we know little of the Costello review. The Chief Minister came and told us that we as Canberrans, not his government, had been living beyond our means. This is in the context of a $1.6 billion revenue boom, revenues over and above what has been budgeted for; yet the Chief Minister’s excuse when he cannot deliver services, when he raises taxes, when he closes schools, is that we, Canberrans, have been living beyond our means—not the government, mind you.
We know that the former Treasurer, in fact, warned of excessive spending in a number of areas. This is from an article from Chris Uhlmann:
There is some evidence the now-retired Treasurer, Ted Quinlan, was warning his fellow ministers that their spending was unsustainable. In a letter to the then Minister for Urban Services, Bill Wood, he expressed concern at a capital works program Wood’s department was proposing. Quinlan … said he was committed to ensuring capital works costs did not continue to increase … In interviews since his retirement, Quinlan … has indicated he also raised the issue of runaway recurrent spending in Cabinet but his protests were ignored.
The process by which this government operated was: in these good times, with the revenue streaming in from property, with the revenue streaming in from GST, they would spend, spend, spend. It was not targeted spending; it was not spending that set up the ACT for the long term. It was, as was suggested by the former Treasurer, Ted Quinlan, wasteful spending; it was spending for the sake of it.
Then we got to this crisis point where they asked for a functional review so that they could figure out all the things that they had been doing wrong and the government could find a way of getting out of the economic hole and the budgetary hole that it had dug. But it must be noted that it had dug this budgetary hole during the good times. It does put into some context, I think, as we face the challenges of a slowdown, how this government will be prepared to deal with it when they were not able to deal with an economic boom, when they were not able to deal with a revenue boom such that it had to have this horror budget on the back of this secret report.
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