Page 2491 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 9 August 2016
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In 2010-11 the government promised that they would be back in the black three years later. In 2011-12 again it was three years later. In 2012-13 it was two years later. In 2013-14 it was two years later. In 2014-15 it was three years later. In 2016-17 it is three years later. There is a trend developing. It is the government that likes to pretend that they are chasing a surplus but in reality they are not.
It goes to whether there is a structural issue in the budget and whether there are actually going to be long-term issues. It is the government that is, in effect, seeing expenditure growth being faster than revenue growth in the general government sector and that is a fundamental problem with the government. If that keeps continuing, if you do keep getting expenditure growth going considerably faster than revenue, the situation can only get worse.
But it does beg the question: what is actually the reason for that? The government may claim that it is the mining boom coming to an end, the asbestos eradication scheme or cuts to the public service federally, but each of these has been known about for some time.
This is a government that has been running a fear campaign on public service jobs for a long time. Yet each year’s budget seems to treat it as some surprise, and they keep using it as a surprise excuse in each budget. Of course it is a furphy that this is a major contributor to any issues with our budget, but it is the government that keeps hiding behind it.
There is also the issue of the mining boom. Many economists were saying that the mining boom would come to an end. The federal budget several years ago stated that there were going to be declining revenues due to the mining boom. Yet here we have it in our budget that the mining boom is the reason why we do not have a budget surplus in the ACT, which begs the question: when you get 42 per cent of your revenue from the commonwealth, what real impact would the mining boom actually have for ACT revenue? It is actually pretty marginal. Whether the mining industry is extremely strong or extremely weak is not going to have a tremendous impact on our ACT budget. It is certainly not going to influence our own-source revenue. It may impact the revenue we get from the commonwealth. Even so we have seen an increase in revenue from the commonwealth this year and it seems we are going to keep seeing it.
I think it would help if we actually had a genuine fiscal strategy in the ACT, if we actually had genuine principles that the government was trying to follow. Whereas numerous states around Australia actually do stipulate principles or key performance criteria that they try to meet in their budgets, the ACT government simply does not have that. Instead all that we have is:
The 2016-17 Budget reinforces the Government’s commitment to a fiscal strategy that achieves an operating balance over time.
That is the extent of the fiscal strategy in this budget, as far as is actually documented. (Second speaking period taken.) If that is the extent of the strategy, it is no wonder
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