Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Honourable Speaker, I rise to give the Greens’ contribution to this Supply Bill (No. 1). I want to say up front that we Greens recognise the gravity and significance of today and take it incredibly seriously. We will say up front that we will, of course, support these supply bills. We understand the contingency nature of them and we understand the significance of them in terms of keeping the services of government running, and keeping community service organisations running, which is a point I want to make really clearly.
Before I go to the bill specifically, I acknowledge and thank the parliamentary staff for having us all back here today, because this is not an unprecedented but certainly an unusual situation. I acknowledge parliamentary staff.
I also acknowledge the Treasury staff who did a power of work to get us to last Thursday with the Budget that is obviously now on ice, and they have done additional work to pull together this supplementary budget or supply bill, and the briefing we had this morning. I appreciate the briefing we had and understand the mechanics of this budget. We understand that things like operational expenditure have been calculated by percentage and applied to the services of government going forward, and we understand similar approaches happened when it comes to capital funding. This highlights the work that the Treasury staff has done and the importance of the public service, full stop. This is an urgent supply bill and they have delivered it in time for today’s session. I am not sure whether Treasury staff are frontline or backline staff, but it does reinforce the absolute significance of our public service and the need to keep them operating.
We also acknowledge that there are no new initiatives funded in this supply bill. There will be disappointed people not only disappointed when it comes to some of the applications in this bill, but we do acknowledge that existing commitments remain funded going forwards. No new initiatives are to be funded until a new budget is developed and ultimately passed.
One question – and an invitation – for the Treasurer is to understand how the efficiency dividends – Treasurer, if you are listening – are treated in this bill. We did not get to ask that question this morning in the briefing, but I assume they carry on forward because they were in the 2024-25 budget. It would be really useful if the Treasurer could understand how government departments in this interim period are planning on addressing some of the instructions and the directions that have been sent to them from ministers in terms of efficiency dividends.
The previous budget was a shock. It was a shock to we Greens and it was a shock to many people in the community. Over $10 billion by 2028, $562 million more than previous forecasts. We know the Revised Estimate Report updated the last budget, and so we Greens did not necessarily have confidence in the figures of the Budget that the Treasurer put forward last Thursday. The figures in it were alarming enough, and if the trends are correct and previous updates to budgets are correct, we could have expected a revised set of figures further down the line and the situation to get worse.
We find ourselves in this situation because the Premier and the government have failed to listen. There have been plenty of opportunities over the last few months of parliament, going back to March, for the government to listen to not only the opinions of the crossbench but listen to the opinions of the community, and it has chosen not to listen. It has chosen not to listen and to bulldoze on. Many things contribute to that, but the end result is the Premier losing the confidence of the House last Thursday, which is a situation that does not happen very often and it has to be said that the government’s response to it is somewhat unprecedented as well.
We Greens are always going to stand for making sure that public services are properly funded, that people are supported in health, housing and education and that we adequately fund environmental protection so that we can rise to the challenges that are facing us, whether it is in our marine environment, whether it is on land, whether it is with threatened species, fire and climate change. These are the kind of things that we are always going to want to see in a budget. To do that, it is clear we need to take some advice from the experts. We need to make sure that big corporations pay their fair share. We need to make sure we set infrastructure budgets that are affordable and then prioritise the projects that sit under them, that we do not pick winners and then build a budget around those winners. We need to make sure that debt is manageable and we need to make sure that Tasmanian people are looked after. All eyes are on this parliament today and what happens after it. We Greens will support this supply bill. We absolutely accept the contingency nature of it. We absolutely accept that this is a least-best situation but it is what has to be done to keep government running. It is what has to be done to keep the services that so many Tasmanians rely on being delivered. On that basis, we will certainly support these supply bills.
