Page 3001 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
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annual reports that are provided to give additional information. The territory budget is there to perform a certain function; it is not there to provide to members all the information about every aspect of every program and every output class to members. There are other ways that that information is available to members.
There is a genuine commitment from Treasury to constantly look at how they present the budget papers. I think you will see that this year we did the reader’s guide to the budget and did not do the budget at a glance. We changed that so people could use the reader’s guide and then apply that to the budget papers and hopefully navigate them in a way that was easier for people who do not routinely use budget paper 3 and budget paper 4 as conversation topics, unlike people in this place—which is an indication of where our lives have gone.
This budget gets the balance right. I understand that there will be criticism of every budget. It does not seek to impose unreasonable or significant increases in revenue. We could do that. Those decisions come to budget cabinet for consideration. When you are looking at deficits in the order that we are looking at for the 2010-11 year of $83 million, of course cabinet considered increases to rates over and above the wage price index. But we did not agree to it because we felt a measured and longer term approach to solving the budget deficit was achievable without imposing unreasonable revenue initiatives on the community. We sought to minimise those.
We could come out of deficit a lot earlier if we sought to slash the public sector, if we sought to not pay our staff any increase, if we sought to increase revenue across our revenue lines. Would that be a reasonable thing to do? The budget cabinet decided it was not. It decided to pull forward the budget plan by two years, and we can do that without imposing additional revenue. That is something governments have to consider every year, and the opposition would be no different. If they were in government, they would be looking at all of these issues as well, because they would be faced with the same dilemmas as we are. Just because we are a Labor government does not mean that the initiatives and the demands from government change or become greater than they would if there was, God forbid, a Liberal government in place.
These are the hard decisions that governments have to make. They are hard, and the government considers them at length. While you can pick and choose little projects, like Mrs Dunne has done tonight referring to the things she would not support and things she does, you cannot operate like that in government. It is all about trying to get the balance right. Every department has needs; they are all different. Some ministers prioritise their own areas above those of other ministers because they want to get a better deal for their own areas, but that is not the way it works. What you get at the end is a consensus document of compromise, and that is what a budget is. It is not everything we wanted to do and probably not everything we could do, but it was everything that was reasonable to do this year. Whilst we are facing the budget pressures that we are facing, that is a reasonable approach, and I think the community understands and believes that it is a reasonable approach.
We have big risks to our budget in the future. We have concerns, which are outlined in the budget, in terms of the outlook and summary of major risks. They largely rest on the commonwealth’s action taken to recover their budget and what that means for the ACT. That remains our biggest concern, and this government will continue to lobby the commonwealth on that issue alone.
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