Page 1227 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 24 March 2009
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services, there is nothing from those opposite. They do not address those areas because they actually know that that increased expenditure into those areas is very worth while and they cannot object to it; so they play the small line. They go and find the things that are going to get them the political headline and that they can run a case against—waste and neglect.
Yet, when you actually look at the argument on its merits and you look at the savings that we have imposed—$100 million worth of savings into agencies’ budgets since 2006—they object to those as well; so they cannot have it both ways. You cannot object to built-in savings measures to make sure that we run the most efficient and the most effective public sector that we can.
There is always room for improvement. And we are constantly looking at ways to improve the efficiency of our public services. If you take health as an example, several years ago health costs were running at 130 per cent of the Australian average. They are now down to around 110 per cent and coming down further. That is a 20 per cent improvement in efficiency over the last four years, and that is pretty significant when a third of your budget is your health budget. That is the kind of area we are focused on, making sure that we manage our resources most efficiently.
I am not saying that we do not look to other areas of government to continue to make sure that we are targeting our dollars into the best place. We will do that and we continue to do that in the budget. In terms of this year, in terms of the challenges that the Australian economy faces, perhaps it is more relevant than ever that we make sure that every cent of government expenditure is targeted to the area where it is going to deliver the most for the community. And we do that. We do that as part of our budget and we do that as part of our job, mindful of the role that the ACT government plays in the ACT economy.
I have gone to this: we are always looking for room for improvement but we are also committed to delivering high-quality public services. And that means investing in community services, investing in health, investing in education, investing in community services and investing in our assets, more across the board. If that involves signs and some tree guards that yes, become political footballs because of the attention and the headlines they can grab, then we will continue to do those things because it is important that we do them for the community.
We have some significant challenges ahead in terms of this budget. I am not sure what the position of the opposition is in terms of what they expect to see. They seem to be running different lines: more money here but we have got to run savings and efficiencies in other areas. I am not actually sure what type of budget they would have brought down had they won the last election but we are very mindful of the fact that during difficult times such as this it is the responsibility of government to invest but to target that investment and make sure that that investment delivers for the community, not only in the short term but in the long term. And that is what we have been trying to do with our third appropriation and it is what we will do with the ACT budget as well.
We look forward to the opposition’s new-found support for the efficiency savings that we have implemented over the past two years and that are built into agencies’ budgets.
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