Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Honourable Speaker, it gives me perverse pleasure to stand up and talk about the 2025‑26 interim Budget and some of the warped priorities of the Liberal Government, and match that against the desperate needs of everyday Tasmanians. This is called an interim budget, but really, it’s an incomplete and ill‑conceived budget that has more holes in it than substance. It does bolster the privileged, it abandons the needy, and it demonstrates this government’s priorities and choices, and they are truly something that we do not support. Before I get into the details of the Budget, I acknowledge and thank our Treasury staff. I know there’s a huge amount of work that goes into a budget. This was done in a compressed time frame, and while we criticise this Budget strongly, we are not criticising their work, because we know they are under instruction from the Treasurer and they are professionals ‑ frustrated professionals perhaps, but professionals. I acknowledge and thank them for their work, and for the briefings and other information that has been provided.
We know that the Treasury staff could be frustrated professionals, because when they are unfettered by the Treasurer and his viewpoints, they do give some very, very frank advice. The Pre-Election Financial Outlook (PEFO) this year was some of that very frank advice indeed. It demonstrated, and Treasury made it very clear, that the Budget has a structural problem and that we simply cannot grow our way out of this structural problem. Whenever the Treasurer talks up the Macquarie Point stadium as the shining white knight that’s going to ride in and save the Tasmanian economy, he’s saying that directly counter to his own Treasury officials’ advice.
They also say that explicit policy choices are required, and that we need sustained and immediate action to rectify the Budget. They raise the significant risk of a credit rating downgrade; both S&P and Moody’s have got Tasmania now on a negative watch. They are watching the deficit and indeed the debt levels, and if indeed they do downgrade our credit rating, that’s going to make credit more expensive and servicing our debts more expensive. As we see our debt going through the roof over the forward Estimates, that’s going to have a very significant impact on our bottom line. While the government like to talk about savings and efficiencies coming out of the general government sector, they don’t like to talk about servicing the debt, and the fact that the debt is serviced from the general government sector.
A good way to make savings every single year, year on year, is to not put ourselves into profound levels of debt, as is happening under this government, particularly in a stadium era. The PEFO has identified that there are costs and uncertainty associated with the stadium. We won’t know how much it costs until it is contracted, and they acknowledge that there is a really tight construction mark at the moment, that there’s a bespoke roof design, and that the cost of related projects continually blow out. We see that time and time again, some of them not even major construction projects. We heard today about the blowout in the ticketing system in the metro. I mean, how can that be?
The Treasury have also identified that there is uncertainty around the $240 million federal contribution to build urban renewal at Macquarie Point. It’s tied to housing; it’s not tied to a stadium, and so the Treasury, quite rightly, raised the risk about what happens if that housing condition does not get met. More on the stadium later.
I want to touch firstly on the budget panel by Treasurer Abetz and say that it has been a welcome and currently useful process for me as a member of the crossbench. It helps me to gain access to Treasury, to improve budget literacy, to try to understand, and have the ability to directly question Treasury and the Treasurer ‑ not on the public record albeit, but nonetheless it is useful. The terms of reference of that budget panel are really clear. It makes it abundantly clear that the budget is an instrument of executive government. That means that government owns the budget, so we can’t get blamed for these bad decisions. The government isn’t consulting, taking our view and putting it into the budget. The true value of this panel won’t necessarily be known until next year, but we’re under no illusions that this government is going to suddenly hear those consultations, take our advice and put our advice into any future budget. The government makes a virtue out of ignoring feedback from consultations, so we’re under no illusions there. In the meantime, it’s a useful platform to gain more information, and we’ll continue to participate in it until we’re given good reason not to ‑ which is a warning, I guess, to the Treasurer and others not to abuse that panel, and to use it in the spirit of why it was put up in the first place.
The Budget has already been called out very clearly by members in this place, and I want to add to that. It’s quite shambolic, it’s a bit fraudulent, it’s a mirage. As it says, it identifies a modest $5 million surplus at the end of the forward Estimates, but it has no genuine pathway to get to that surplus and we are inevitably going to loop back to a deficit. What we have seen in past budgets is consistent underbudgeting and supplementary appropriations needed. In this Budget, we are seeing forward Estimates just blanked out from programs and initiatives that we can’t believe would or should be defunded, so it’s highly likely that in the next budget they’re going to get numbers plugged into those figures and that surplus in the forward Estimates is going to miraculously disappear.
Then, of course, there are the efficiency dividends. The Efficiency and Productivity Unit (EPU) has been established to identify those efficiency dividends and there’s significant uncertainty around the ability of government to be able to deal with that, so it’s a highly problematic budget that I think is based on false pretences and even though it has baked-in cuts and is deserving of significant criticism, the surplus, at the very least, is completely fraudulent.
The Treasurer identified peak debt and the fact that we’re going to reach peak debt by the end of the forward Estimates. Peak debt is when Tasmania earns enough to cover the costs of debt servicing, which means we don’t need to borrow simply to service our debt. That is currently a mirage. If we only have a surplus of $5 million in the forward Estimates, there is no way we are going to be able to meet the needs of servicing our debt, not least building debt, layering debt upon debt with a stadium. The Treasurer’s speech has peak debt as a pipe dream because the debt is going to be serviced from the general government sector.
Debt is currently at $7 billion and by 2029 it is going to be $10.4 billion, so there is no way we are going to be able to meet those needs by own-source revenue, which is why people such as Saul Eslake and others are identifying the need for policy change so that we can increase the revenue that this state earns and can actually fund the services that Tasmanians deserve and meet our commitments when it comes to the debt that needs servicing.
The other thing with the debt that has been highlighted in here already is that that $10.4 billion is simply the general government sector and, of course, the government businesses are borrowing as well. We are seeing a situation where we are going to continue to need to assist government businesses to meet their financial needs. There has been a big debate in the House over the last days about TT-Line, its solvency and otherwise, but it is really clear that government businesses and taking government departments like Homes Tasmania off the general government sector books is simply a way of hiding debt and covering up the need to service those debts.
Homes Tasmania’s debt burden will double over the next five years, from $500 million today to $1 billion by the end of 2029 – $25 million to service now, $50 million in 2029. Macquarie Point is projected to borrow $490.7 million to build the stadium by 2031, and that’s not assuming the inevitable cost overruns that will come with a toxic, constrained site and the other issues associated with that site.
The cost to the general government sector simply for servicing that Macquarie Point debt, the $490 million, doesn’t include the $375 million the government is going to borrow to inject as capital, but simply to service the Macquarie Point debt, means we are going to give them $21.9 million in 2029‑30, $30.7 million in 2030‑31, and $32 million in 2031‑32, and we can assume that that $30 million price tag simply to service the debt for the stadium will be ongoing, because with no credible plan to pay off that debt, these are going to be annual costs baked into our government sector. These are going to be the costs that we have to pay at the same time as we are sacking nurses and teachers and health professionals. As to the credit rating that I mentioned before, if our credit rating is downgraded, it makes it even worse.
I want to touch on Labor because Labor’s position has been nonsensical when it comes to debt and support for the stadium. We’ve heard Labor members in here rail against the level of debt, rail against the cost of servicing debt, and yet are blindly supporting $2 billion being added to that debt burden at least over the next 10-years.
Similarly, regarding expert advice, we’ve heard our question after question from the Leader of the Opposition today about the the Auditor-General, about the TT-Line, about whose advice who believes, whether you believe the chairman or the Auditor-General. If you want to have a conversation about listening to expert advice, let’s have a listen to the Tasmanian Planning Commission.
It was very unedifying to hear the interjections from the Leader of the Opposition during the Leader of the Greens’ contribution, arguing about whether there’s been unconditional support given for the stadium. I would really welcome a Labor member telling us what condition has been put on their support for the stadium, because it hasn’t been whether it costs a billion dollars or $2 billion or $3 billion, it hasn’t been whether or not the Planning Commission would support it – and of course the Planning Commission unequivocally said that it should not be built.
Saul Eslake said that this government can no longer blame COVID or the commission of inquiry recommendations but that these are active policy decisions, including election policy decisions, that are driving this Budget into crisis. It is clear that we need to change track. We need to drop unnecessary expenditure like the stadium and we need to increase revenue generation.
The Leader of the Greens went through our election commitments quite clearly that found a billion dollars’ worth of savings, raised $900 million worth of additional revenue and when you factored in the additional expenditure that we included in the election, the budget was $1.4 billion better off. It has to be done because, as Treasury has said, we can’t grow our way out of this crisis and we need to make active policy decisions.
On some portfolio areas, starting with the Environment, we are in a crisis. We had fires last summer that burnt 100,000 hectares. We had a marine heat wave, and we had the catastrophic and tragic incidence of mass salmon mortalities that impacted on so many beaches in the state. We’ve got extinction being a reality. We’ve got the swift parrot, the skate, we’ve got the blue wing parrot recently been uplifted and literally last weekend we’ve had the curlew sandpiper and the Alaskan bar-tailed godwit uplisted to endangered here in Tasmania. These are species that rely on a healthy environment for survival, and when it comes to the swift parrot, the Minister for Environment’s answer this morning was utterly underwhelming.
The swift parrot recovery plan that this government signed identified that we needed to protect habitat from logging. The State of the Environment Report identified that we need to protect public land to save threatened species, yet the government is not acting on its own recovery plan in terms of stopping logging in critical habitat and when it comes to the state of the environment recommendation, it’s pointing at private land conservation and yet it’s not even adequately funding it in the Budget. The State of the Environment Report was a dire prediction that things are going to get worse unless we turn the ship around.
The National Climate Risk Assessment highlighted that Tasmania was one of the most at-risk states in the country for climate impacts, yet funding for climate is down from $10 million to $2.8 million at the end of the the forward Estimates.
This government talks up net zero, but let’s be real, the only reason we have reached a net zero status is because of the forest protection that was delivered over a decade ago. That is why we have net zero status. The EPAs has no increase despite a need for increased regulatory challenges and we need more improvement when it comes to the legislation that underpins the Environmental Protection Authority. It needs more teeth, it needs more independence. We’ve just had the situation where antibiotic use has been approved for our waterways to treat the diseased salmon outbreaks in our waterways and the EPA will have to monitor that and is going to have to be doing additional work in relation to that. We have dolphins getting tied up in nets, getting caught in seal nets. It is clear that we need more action when it comes to not only the environment, but action on climate change.
When it comes to Housing, this budget bakes in failure. The targets just get worse. In May, when the prorogued budget was handed down, we had a wait list on the priority housing list of 5094 people. Now, it’s 5336 ‑ an absolute record ‑ and applicants are waiting longer. Need is outstripping provision, and that is a political choice. We have to understand that.
Homes Tasmania has been reviewed. It’s clear that it needs to be restructured. It is a structure that we Greens didn’t support in 2022 and it’s really clear that it needs additional work. The government made a commitment for 10,000 new and social affordable homes by 2032, but we see it consistently fudging the figures in terms of making up the numbers. Of course, there are things we can do in the housing space that don’t even cost money. We can rein in short‑stay accommodation, which would earn money. The five per cent levy has been kicked into the long grass until next year.
We can establish rent controls. We can end unfair evictions. We can make sure that there’s minimum standards so that people save money and live in appropriate housing. We can make sure that there are other modification opportunities for tenants so that they can modify their house for disability, safety, security and other reasons.
In Education, Cassy O’Connor now has the Education portfolio for the Greens, and we welcome a recent schooling resource standard announcement earlier in the year, but note that the four per cent loophole remains. It means that the Teachers Registration Board, depreciation, and other things, come out of that funding. It’s not good enough. Wage growth is stagnant, and we need to recruit and retrain more professionals, because we’ve seen those wait lists for specialist services in schools get longer and longer.
In the Energy space, we saw the government make massive decisions, humongous decisions around Marinus Link in the wake of the election campaign without proper reference to the caretaker period and without acknowledgement of the massive red flags that were in the business case. We have capital investments into TasNetworks for the North West Transmission Developments. We have huge costs predicted for major industrials, for households and others, to be offset by the mega profits to be earned by the Hydro ‑ and what happened to the Hydro’s profits this year? They’ve completely collapsed, because of the drying conditions, because of poor flows into the dams. We still haven’t got Hydro acknowledging what they’ve done, or indeed releasing the river flow modelling that underpins their profit calculations going forward. The whole investments around energy are largely smoke and mirrors, and will ultimately assist big corporations into multinational corporations, and it’s going to cost energy users here in Tasmania.
When it comes to veterans, we know that the RSL has learned not to lean too hard on the Tasmanian Budget. They have only small, project‑based funding, and they have been comprehensively shafted when it comes to their interests on the cenotaph and the stadium. Despite a strong campaign from the RSL, despite the fact that they don’t want the stadium, they have been utterly ignored.
When it comes to the arts, as always, it’s utterly underwhelming. There are bits and pieces for TMAG, there’s bits and pieces for the Theatre Royal. Yet, again, when it comes to the stadium, there is no problem finding $4 million‑plus dollars for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra for compensation and upgrades. Meanwhile, Blue Cow Theatre, Wide Angle Tas and other entities go out of business.
This is not a budget for the everyday Tasmanian; it is a budget that is warped in its priorities.
Time expired.
