STATE BUDGET

The Hon. I.F. EVANS (Davenport) (15:06): My question is again to the Premier. Why is the Premier claiming that his revenue forecasts are very pessimistic or based on pessimistic assumptions when the Premier is forecasting stamp duty revenue to grow at 12 per cent, payroll tax revenue to grow at 7 per cent and GST revenue to grow at 7 per cent a year? All of these are well above his economic growth forecasts.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Premier, Treasurer, Minister for State Development, Minister for the Public Sector, Minister for the Arts) (15:07): I thank the honourable member for his question. There is not a direct correlation between the economic growth forecast and the growth in those revenue estimates. I simply repeat what the chief economist at St George Bank said: that these are conservative estimates based on what he believes are the usual conservative approaches that treasuries take.

We would have liked the advice that comes to us from Treasury for these to be rosier estimates. It would have provided us with a greater capacity to either return to surplus more quickly or apply it to some other spending purposes. It would have given us greater options, but that is not the advice we received. We do not double-guess that advice we get from Treasury; it is something that they supply to us. It is not something that is supplied through the political process. It is essentially the same approach that would have been taken when you were in government: Treasury officers come up with these estimates.

The reference I made to pessimism was the fact that we are looking at property transactions which are at extraordinarily low rates, and we are looking at retail transactions at extraordinarily low rates. So, the increases that we are seeing—and the retail figures, of course, are national retail figures. There are not state-based retail figures fed into those numbers, so they are national retail figures. There is some evidence that they are beginning to lift and there is some strong evidence that there is a return in our local property market, which underpins the basis for the estimates that we have made.