Page 1591 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
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those opposite that have complained about those efficiency measures and sought to have those efficiency measures re-agitated and re-cogitated.
It is very difficult in government to find efficiencies, to save front-line services, to deliver more, while at the same time your revenues are actually diminishing, which is what we have seen. I know Mr Smyth will be saying they have increased, but when you look at them and you pull out the nation building and jobs money which came in but which was for a designated program, so it was not there as general revenue coming in to be used for recurrent spending, you will see that we lost, on average, $230 million a year over our forward estimates from the global financial crisis.
That is a significant loss, yet we only have a deficit that is the small size that we have now. In the midyear review or update, or the budget update, as we are calling it—not to confuse Mr Smyth—we announced a figure of about minus $50 million. We then lost $30 million from the Commonwealth Grants Commission review of relativities, so before we start the budget it is sitting at minus $80 million. To be in that position and to have lost the amount of revenue we lost across the forward estimates, I think speaks to the strength of the budget and the fact that we have sought efficiencies wherever we can and have implemented efficiencies.
I am not going to single out Ms Burch, but we have disability, we have child protection, we have education—and health is always a big offender in terms of demand. We need to meet all of those challenges. I have to say that we have been meeting all of those challenges against what has been a shrinking revenue base. We have dramatically reduced our GST receipts. These have been revised and re-revised over the last three years.
In the future—and we talked about this again today—there is a tax forum coming up in October, the commonwealth tax forum, and I imagine state revenues are going to be discussed pretty openly then. By then, we should have our ACT tax review in our hands and be able to be in a pretty good position to have a discussion around the national tax forum in October. The reason I commissioned that work was that Ken Henry, in his review, signalled the fact that in their view or in his view—and I think it is a view shared by the commonwealth—there are inefficient state revenue lines that need to be looked at. I have no doubt that this will be the subject of much discussion in October at the tax forum. The ACT needs to be well positioned for that, because I think it will turn into “the greedy states with their revenue lines” and “we have to look at that”. It will be very easy to point the finger.
In a small jurisdiction like ours with a narrow revenue base, we need to be able to stand united and protect the revenue that we get in the ACT to ensure that we are able to deliver services to our community. Mr Quinlan’s tax review and the work that has been put into that by the review team will give us some very good information about whether we need to change some of our revenue lines, modernise them, make them more efficient and look at how we transition over time to whatever the tax review recommends. I have not had a meeting with Ted for a while and I need to do that. That will give us good information in the lead-up to that commonwealth tax forum.
It is very easy to come in here, wag your finger and allege that you are the only fiscally disciplined group in the Assembly, but it is not a very mature way to have a
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