Page 2246 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 5 June 2013

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does not have. He says on the one hand that we will not get it because we are going to be in a recession. But on the other hand, the revenue goes up about $250 million—a quarter of a billion dollars a year—and the budget four years from now would have gone from $4 billion to $5 billion. The contradictions are stark. You cannot have all that in your document and all that in your rhetoric. It is inconsistent. You say that growth will drop and yet that the revenue will increase.

That is cloud-cuckoo-land. That is ridiculous. If you are expecting the growth to decline to such a dramatic extent that you can beat your anti-Abbott drum, but at the same time each year for four years your revenue goes up a quarter of a billion dollars, there is something wrong in your accounting. You cannot have it all. You cannot beat your chest and say, “What a good economy we have got because of what we have done,” and, “Woe is us, because we are going to be in turmoil.” Yet we are going to sell all these blocks of land and we are going to get all this money. It is inconsistent in the extreme and it is disingenuous to tell people what you have told them.

Paragraph (2) of the motion states:

supports the projects, reforms and initiatives in the 2013-14 ACT Budget that aim to build and transform Canberra.

Let us look at some of those initiatives. Let us look at the extra funding that goes to ACTION because you cannot run the bus service. Let us look at the money that is going to corrections because you did not budget properly for the prison. What was the claim? It was that it would save us money. I think at the start it was actually going to save us money because all that money was going to be in the ACT economy and we would get better outcomes. That is right; it was going to have capacity for 20 years. Those 20 years have gone pretty quickly. What is it? Is it two or three years—four years?

Now we have got a forward design worth $3 million for extra capacity at the Alexander Maconochie Centre. Why? It is because Minister Corbell got it wrong. The government got it wrong. The minister of the day got it wrong. The delivery got it wrong. They pared it back. It has cost us more per bed than was originally planned. Now we are going to spend a whole lot of money fixing the mistakes that they made because you cannot trust this government on delivery.

This is a government that never delivers. Let us go to the budgeting. I think they have budgeted for two surpluses, budgeted for just two surpluses, in 12 budgets. (Time expired.)

MR BARR (Molonglo—Deputy Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Economic Development, Minister for Sport and Recreation, Minister for Tourism and Events and Minister for Community Services) (10.38): I thank Ms Berry for moving this motion this morning. It is always a pleasure to follow that beacon of light and hope and goodwill, Brendan Smyth—the saddest politician in Canberra, the longest-serving shadow treasurer in the history of the Federation, the man who has had nothing new or positive to say on economic policy in this city in his time in this place since he lost office 12 years ago.


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