Ms CARNEY - 2006-05-03
In the budget year 2002-03, in Budget Paper No 2 on page 76, you projected that the Territory’s income would be $2.46bn. You said that with that amount of money you would be able to bring the budget into surplus. What you actually raked in for this year was $2.97bn. In other words, as you know, you received $500m more than you predicted three years ago, and that was just for one year alone. Yet, you are still going to run a deficit this year. Do you concede that your income is far beyond what you could have dreamed it would be a few years ago, and that your spending has been rescued by income that you never expected to receive?
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, I thank the Leader of the Opposition for her question. It is a bit of both sides of the coin, is it not? On the one hand we get bashed up for spending too much. On the other hand, when the minister explains the difficulties of trying to secure an allocation of funding within his budget - because he and his chief executive have to come in within budget - he gets banged up for not using some of the GST for the bus.
The luxury of opposition is always that you can spend, spend and spend. Of course, the register never stops ringing. However, it does not matter because it is all theoretical. We have seen and heard over the years from the opposition that any increases in the GST have been spent three, four and five times over in various forms. One of them, of course, was to abolish payroll tax - just abolish payroll tax. A couple of hundred million out of own source revenue. It does not matter, you just knock it off, you have the GST.
I make no apology for the growth in public sector numbers over the first four years of the life of this government. Every one of those positions was entirely necessary to bring back a credible form of service delivery for Territorians, particularly in the key service delivery agencies: the big ones of Health, which was a basket case, and fraudulently put together budgets to disguise the real …
Ms CARNEY: A point of order, Madam Speaker! Keep him honest. If the Treasurer, as he did many years ago, wants to bring on such an important issue, according to him, he should do so by way of substantive motion.
Mr STIRLING: … fraudulent preparation of the Health budget to disguise the level of funding.
Madam SPEAKER: Minister, I will seek some advice on this.
Ms Carney: You are a shocker.
Mr STIRLING: It was found by the Public Accounts Committee. If that is not good enough for the Legislative Assembly, I will go he.
Madam SPEAKER: Treasurer, if you could rephrase that, please?
Mr STIRLING: Suffice it to say there was a very unsatisfactory finding against the presentation of the Health budget in those years.
Madam Speaker, I do not want to get distracted on that side. The fact is that Health was a basket case. We have had enormous funding increases into Health to where it stands today. Education was along similar lines - strengthening education outcomes for our students. We well know the sorry story of police – absolutely frozen, starved of funding under our predecessors, and Mr O’Sullivan’s recommendations have put us on track.
There is a similar commentary about our contract officers and executive officers in the public service. If you are introducing and rolling out new policies and new programs, you have to have a quite serious level of policy development within those agencies. Much of that work has been done and those programs are being rolled out as I speak. The numbers in the public sector are at historically high levels, no doubt about that. They will come down. I have repeatedly said over the last five to six months that numbers will come down over the mid- to long-term, with those programs well in place and no new initiatives being rolled out as we speak. That is not to say that the Commonwealth will not come along in two months’ time with a number of programs across a range of agencies, all of which will require corresponding expenditure from us and, probably, staff numbers coming on. That is another reason why staff numbers need to come down over time, because there has to be capacity for those eventualities into the future.
If we are spending too much on police, health and education, it is incumbent on the Leader of the Opposition to tell us what positions and services she would cut, and tell Territorians what is not going to occur that is occurring under this government. That is the responsibility you have. You cannot make these allegations that we are spending too much, thereby implying you are going to make drastic cuts yourself, without telling us where those service and personnel cuts will occur.
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, I thank the Leader of the Opposition for her question. It is a bit of both sides of the coin, is it not? On the one hand we get bashed up for spending too much. On the other hand, when the minister explains the difficulties of trying to secure an allocation of funding within his budget - because he and his chief executive have to come in within budget - he gets banged up for not using some of the GST for the bus.
The luxury of opposition is always that you can spend, spend and spend. Of course, the register never stops ringing. However, it does not matter because it is all theoretical. We have seen and heard over the years from the opposition that any increases in the GST have been spent three, four and five times over in various forms. One of them, of course, was to abolish payroll tax - just abolish payroll tax. A couple of hundred million out of own source revenue. It does not matter, you just knock it off, you have the GST.
I make no apology for the growth in public sector numbers over the first four years of the life of this government. Every one of those positions was entirely necessary to bring back a credible form of service delivery for Territorians, particularly in the key service delivery agencies: the big ones of Health, which was a basket case, and fraudulently put together budgets to disguise the real …
Ms CARNEY: A point of order, Madam Speaker! Keep him honest. If the Treasurer, as he did many years ago, wants to bring on such an important issue, according to him, he should do so by way of substantive motion.
Mr STIRLING: … fraudulent preparation of the Health budget to disguise the level of funding.
Madam SPEAKER: Minister, I will seek some advice on this.
Ms Carney: You are a shocker.
Mr STIRLING: It was found by the Public Accounts Committee. If that is not good enough for the Legislative Assembly, I will go he.
Madam SPEAKER: Treasurer, if you could rephrase that, please?
Mr STIRLING: Suffice it to say there was a very unsatisfactory finding against the presentation of the Health budget in those years.
Madam Speaker, I do not want to get distracted on that side. The fact is that Health was a basket case. We have had enormous funding increases into Health to where it stands today. Education was along similar lines - strengthening education outcomes for our students. We well know the sorry story of police – absolutely frozen, starved of funding under our predecessors, and Mr O’Sullivan’s recommendations have put us on track.
There is a similar commentary about our contract officers and executive officers in the public service. If you are introducing and rolling out new policies and new programs, you have to have a quite serious level of policy development within those agencies. Much of that work has been done and those programs are being rolled out as I speak. The numbers in the public sector are at historically high levels, no doubt about that. They will come down. I have repeatedly said over the last five to six months that numbers will come down over the mid- to long-term, with those programs well in place and no new initiatives being rolled out as we speak. That is not to say that the Commonwealth will not come along in two months’ time with a number of programs across a range of agencies, all of which will require corresponding expenditure from us and, probably, staff numbers coming on. That is another reason why staff numbers need to come down over time, because there has to be capacity for those eventualities into the future.
If we are spending too much on police, health and education, it is incumbent on the Leader of the Opposition to tell us what positions and services she would cut, and tell Territorians what is not going to occur that is occurring under this government. That is the responsibility you have. You cannot make these allegations that we are spending too much, thereby implying you are going to make drastic cuts yourself, without telling us where those service and personnel cuts will occur.
Last updated: 09 Aug 2016