Page 1778 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 8 June 2016
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This Treasurer is rapidly becoming the Wayne Swan of ACT treasurers in that his tax reforms have not delivered what he has promised and the surpluses that he said were coming—I think his first surplus was supposed to be 2014-15—now are still out at 2018-19, well beyond the reach of this government and well beyond the term of this government. And you have to ask: what has the Treasurer achieved?
What the motion looks at is the fact that when he became Treasurer he inherited a $44 million surplus. So he has been able to take a surplus and he has turned it into a deficit, and the deficits continue in the outyears until we get to, hopefully, the 2018-19 year, where a very slim deficit of $33 million is there in the distance. Is it a mirage, or can the Treasurer and Chief Minister achieve it? What he has got to do is convince people that he can constrain his spending.
When you look at the way that this Treasurer spends, spending goes up. In 2015-16 it was $5.1 billion expenses; in 2016-17, $5.4 billion. He is going to have us believe that in the 2017-18 year that will drop back to $5.3 billion. But then it jumps to $5.5 billion and then it jumps again in 2019-20 to $5.7 billion.
We have seen this pattern of figures in the budget papers time after time and yet what has he delivered? In 2012-13 the deficit was $273 million; in 2013-14, $187 million; in 2014-15, $479 million. In the 2015-16 budget it was meant to be $407 million. But in the revised estimates it was $478 million. It has now come in at $332 million, and we welcome that. A reducing deficit is a good thing. Then in the following year it is meant to be $180 million. But like everything this Treasurer promises we never seem to see that.
You have only got to look at the deficits. In 2015-16 it climbed $71 million between the budget and the revised estimates. Now it has come down, and that is largely due to commonwealth grants and land sales. But you have to ask the question: how long can this territory survive on land sales alone?
We see that general government expenditures have climbed by more than $1.1 billion during this Treasurer’s incumbency. So it is not a revenue problem that this Treasurer and this government have. They will take your hard-earned dollars and they will spend them as they see fit. It is not the revenue; it is how they spend it and what they achieve for it.
You would not mind if things were getting better. You would not mind if the streets were cleaner, the broken pavements were fixed and the dead trees were removed in a timely fashion and if the quality of the service at the hospital was excellent—and we thank our nurses and doctors—but it is the timeliness and the ability to access that service that I think is the main gripe of people. And you would not mind if the educational outcomes were better for all students. Instead we have cages in schools. You would not mind if people felt safer. But I do not suspect that people do. And that is the hallmark of this government: big on spending, big on promises, short on delivery.
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