Page 529 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 10 February 2009
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Hawke-Keating governments, of which Mr Stanhope was a part as an adviser, that left $96 billion worth of debt. And now they are simply saying, “Trust us,” with no analysis and no back-up.
We saw it again today. We asked the Treasurer very simple and very reasonable questions: “What does this do to our budget bottom line?” “Can’t answer.” “How much extra revenue will the government get from this package?” “Don’t know.” “What is the cost of the maintenance of the packages when they’re built?” “Can’t tell you.” This all impacts on us, and saying that you will find out in the budget three months from now is unacceptable.
If people are being urged to sign up to a package then they need to know what they are getting themselves into. If you sign up to a loan now, you have got to sign the disclosure statement saying that you have read the disclosure and you understand what you are getting yourself into. We are being asked, as a country, to sign up to $42 billion worth of debt with undefined benefits. I think it behoves the government, particularly our ACT government, to tell us exactly what we will get for it, not the half-answers and the non-answers that we got today.
With respect to the answers that we got yesterday, the government rang and offered the opposition and the Greens a briefing to tell us how this would work and, quite frankly, there were no answers. We used those words today: “guesstimate”, “not sure”, “still working out the detail”, “waiting for the numbers”, “all in the melting pot”, “forming on an hourly basis”, “we don’t know”, “yet to be finalised”, “waiting for confirmation”. It just went on and on. That might be the case and it might be a reasonable thing that they do not know the answers if the federal government has not provided them to them. But they cannot come in here and laud this package and say, “We should support it, the country should support it, everybody should vote for it,” if they do not know the answers. They should be asking the federal government to come clean and tell them exactly how it will be finalised.
You have only to go to the record of the Stanhope government. You cannot trust the Stanhope-Gallagher government on economic matters, because they squandered the $1.6 billion bonus that came as extra revenue in the last seven years. They actually budgeted for deficits in the boom time. At the top of the economic cycle, they were broke. They had spent so much money, and continued to spend—reckless spending—for seven years, which has now been brought to a shuddering halt. You cannot trust the Stanhope-Gallagher government. Indeed, we always have the perennial argument where the government does not know the difference between the economic and electoral cycles.
Indeed, you cannot trust the Stanhope-Gallagher government on the election promises or their knowledge of their promises. On 17 September, Mr Stanhope issued a press release headed “ACT Labor pledges continued responsible spending and budget surpluses”. “We pledge this.” All around them, the world is going to pieces. Lehmans collapsed about three days before this, and banks are dropping off the perch like nothing on earth. But Jon Stanhope, wearing his King Canute robe, said: “I can stop this. It’s not going to affect the ACT.” In his press release he pledged that “Labor’s fully-funded election promises would maintain a forecast budget surplus for each of the years of the next term”. He had the answers. Nobody else in the world has got an
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