Page 2406 - Week 08 - Thursday, 6 June 2013
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Madam Speaker, they are not my words; they are the words of then opposition leader, Jon Stanhope, at the Labor campaign launch in October 2001. If ever there was a government that was drifting towards being lazy, arrogant, aloof and accident prone, it is this one. And there is no better demonstration of these attributes than the budget that was delivered by this government two days ago. It is a document marked by soaring debt, massive deficits, an astonishing failure of delivery and, more than anything, an extraordinary level of deceit.
Turning first to the debt, this budget demonstrates a breathtaking disregard for fiscal responsibility. The borrowings of this government, including its territory-owned corporations, are already $2.7 billion or nearly 70 per cent of the total budget. They skyrocket to over $3.5 billion in the out years. That is $3.5 billion that the taxpayers of the ACT have to repay, and they have to repay it with interest one way or another. The accumulated interest bill on this budget totals over $650 million.
To put that into a meaningful context, that is the equivalent of building and staffing an entire new hospital all in this term and all without debt. It would build all of the light rail, all in this term and all without debt. It would cover the entire cost of the Cotter Dam and leave $200 million in change, and it could create and protect thousands of jobs. But we cannot do any of that because of the mismanagement of the budget by this government, and that is why good governments avoid debt. That is why prudent management counts.
But that is not the end of the issue. This Labor budget does not plan to pay this debt down; it plans to push up deficits. When the effects of superannuation on the budget are taken away, the structural deficits in this budget top over $668 million. That is $668 million more in spending than the government has in income. Let me be clear—that is not for a want of income. There is more revenue than ever before to draw upon—more next year than this year and more in the final year than ever. Revenue is projected to increase by about $250 million a year, and there will be a billion dollars more revenue by the last year of this budget. This is proof beyond doubt that there is no revenue problem for this government. There is no crisis of cash. It is overspending and bad budgeting, pure and simple. And it is this bad budgeting that has led to so many observing that this budget simply fails to deliver.
This budget is not, as Andrew Barr claimed, a budget for a rainy day; this budget is a rainy day. A look down the list of almost any directorate exposes a list of delayed projects, unmet expectations and undelivered promises. I am not talking about the empty rhetoric that this government trots out every election about priorities, but actual outcomes. In every case, it does not deliver.
There are scoping studies and forward design, but very little in actual construction. Court cases are facing massive delays and justice is being denied. We still languish as the worst place in the country on the important measure of emergency department waiting times, despite the repeated promises of improvement. The budget bottom line is under serious threat because of the ACTEW dividends that may be reduced by tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. The jail that was meant to have capacity for 25 years has blown out again by millions of dollars. Projects which were promised
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