Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Honourable Speaker, I thank the opposition for bringing this matter of public importance forward. It’s Budget week and there’s obviously going to be plenty of opportunity to talk about budget. We in the Greens relish every opportunity to do so, because while the Treasurer is touting new terms for this Budget, it is very clear that the best and most appropriate term for this Budget is going to be the ‘stadium austerity budget.’
Politics and budgets are all about priorities, and budgets are about political choices and priorities above anything else. It is clear that this government, aided and abetted by the Labor Party when it comes to this Macquarie Point stadium, has their priorities completely wrong.
The red flags about the stadium have been flown long and high for many months now. Whether it be Saul Eslake talking about policy, talking about debt, talking about the need to right revenue, or whether it be from Treasury ‑ the red flags when it comes to the Budget have been flown very hard.
Treasury itself has said that you can’t grow yourself out of this crisis. While the Treasurer talks about an era of prosperity and this stadium underpinning some kind of new renaissance in Tasmania, he is fundamentally ignoring Treasury’s advice. In the Pre-Election Financial Outlook (PEFO), Treasury was really clear. They said:
The State Budget has a structural problem. Economic growth correlates weekly with the general government sector revenue growth in Tasmania. Accordingly, this structural problem will not be resolved through future economic growth. Explicit policy choices are required.’
These are the policy choices that this government has refused to entertain. They are going down a single track when it comes to this budget, and that is cuts. That is the austerity that is being driven by the stadium: cuts to the public service, cuts to community service organisations.
During the election, the Greens identified $1 billion worth of savings: ending subsidies, stopping support for the stadium. We identified $900 million of new revenue: taxing big corporations to make them pay their fair share, making sure that salmon companies and mining companies pay the national average of revenue. When you took into account some of our new spendings that we identified in the Budget, we improved the Budget bottom line by $1.4 billion. It is significant, and that is what the experts are advising us to do: to find sensible savings and to improve the revenue situation.
Treasury’s finding that you can’t grow your way out of this crisis makes an absolute lie out of the notion that the stadium is going to herald a new era of prosperity. Whether it be Gruen, whether it be the Planning Commission, or whether it be Treasury who has identified a whole range of risks associated with the stadium, it is clear that this stadium will do nothing but load us up with more debt and enforce a situation on our budget where we are borrowing ‑ literally borrowing ‑ to service that debt.
$1.8 billion worth of debt over the next 10 years, $30 million of debt to service the Macquarie Point Development Corporation borrowings alone, and as yet, we don’t have a set figure on how much it’s going to cost to service the $375 million that the state has to borrow.
Of course, we know that this taxpayer is on the hook for every single dollar of cost blowouts, of penalty payments to the AFL. Therefore, the Office of the Coordinator-General ‑ I don’t make a habit of quoting from the Office of the Coordinator-General, because most of his contribution in this debate has been quite farcical, to be honest ‑ but he has identified that $45 to $70 million will be needed to service the debt. That somewhat correlates with some of the figures coming out of Treasury.
Clearly this is a big problem, and a credit-rating downgrade is high on the cards. Both S&P and Moody’s have downgraded our outlook from stable to negative, and Treasury has identified specifically that this downgrade in outlook indicates that there is now a higher likelihood of the state’s long-term credit rating being lowered over the short to medium term. Both rating agencies cited the state’s weakening financial performance and growing debt burden as key factors in assigning the negative outlook for the state. Now is not the time to load onto that growing debt burden an additional $1.8 billion or more to build the stadium, because it’s coming at an expense to our community.
Story after story ‑ whether it be community gardens, the Hobart City Mission, these housing stats that are released today, issues around food, hiking up TasTAFE costs ‑ we simply cannot afford this stadium. This is a stadium austerity budget.
Time expired.
