Page 1915 - Week 05 - Thursday, 5 May 2011
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Let me be blunt: whatever problems Katy Gallagher and ACT Labor have, that the government is short of money is not one of them.
We have heard Katy Gallagher talk about the GFC, to try and pretend there are serious strains on the budget. There are not. On 5 May 2009 the Treasurer claimed that the ACT’s budget deficits in coming years were caused by “a range of external factors beyond our control”, most notably the global financial crisis.
Let us debunk this. Let us look at the numbers. In the 2008-09 budget, the forecast revenue for the coming financial year was $3.738 billion. Then the GFC hit. The forecasts took a downturn. ACT Labor responded not by trimming their expenses but by spending even more, and borrowing to do it.
History now shows that the GFC did not hit Australia nearly as hard as the rest of the world, and it did not hit the ACT nearly as hard as the rest of Australia. This is proven in the revenue forecast in this budget, anticipated to be $3.982 billion. That is nearly $250 million more than the government predicted back in 2008—before the term “GFC” had even been invented.
That means we need not have run up the big debts; we should be in surplus sooner. In 2009 I warned of this fiscal sleight-of-hand when I pointed out that the forward estimates were projected to be a “boom-time best”—or $3.8 billion in 2012-13. Yet we were still expecting a $150 million deficit.
As it turns out, we are now expecting more than $4.1 billion in 2012-13—more than enough to wipe out the expected deficit. And guess what? Even with that $300 million extra, they are still going to run a deficit. This government just cranks up the spending to make sure that we stay in the red.
Katy Gallagher has since tried to claim that it was not, in fact, the GFC; it is other factors, such as the growth in the city. There are 40,000 more people, for example, she tells us. Quite true—around a 12 per cent increase in population. But that does not explain a doubling of the revenue.
What does explain it is a doubling in taxes, which is what has happened. It is undeniable: this government takes more money from more people, for more reasons than ever. More out of every pay packet, more out of every development, more out of every home purchase, more out of every business and more out of every family budget every year.
Given these record revenues, these rivers of gold, it is really quite reasonable to ask: what are we getting for the money? After 10 years, what have we got for all the extra taxes, all the closed schools, all the hikes in rates? For 10 years ACT Labor just have not built what they said they would build, not saved what they said they would save or managed what they said they would manage.
Take health as a starting point—the single biggest departmental expenditure in the entire budget. After 10 years is our health system getting better or worse? The answer
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