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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-06-14 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

State Budget

Mr COWDREY (Colton) (15:02): Just a fortnight ago, I gave a speech in this same spot when I outlined how this year's budget surplus had evaporated. Well, the Treasurer has now revealed that it has not just evaporated: it has been obliterated. When it comes to managing the state's finances, one thing is now glaringly obvious to all South Australians—this is the same old Labor and they cannot be trusted to manage the state's finances, simple as that. Let's look back at what has occurred.

The original surplus of $233 million, gone. We have historic tax revenue that has been delivered and presumably spent, $324 million in additional GST revenue as at the federal budget just a month ago and $192 million in additional state tax revenue as at the Mid-Year Budget Review, a Mid-Year Budget Review that I also note contained over $50 million in flood recovery funding, of which up to half is expected to be clawed back from the commonwealth Disaster Recovery Fund.

Still, at that point in time, noting the floods, a $206 million surplus was projected by the Treasurer halfway through the financial year. Now we know that we are set for a $249 million deficit when it is all said and done. This is the same Treasurer who just six months ago was on morning radio effectively asking people how he should spend the additional tax revenue. Now where are we? A two-week pre-budget sell of excuses and apologies. The windfall, as he called it then, has been more than overallocated.

What has happened to the $155 million of savings tasks allocated to non-frontline services? Will frontline services continue to be spared moving forward? How many executive positions within the public sector, in particular within DPC, have been cut and created since the election? How has the first financial year's $42 million of savings been made across government? Rik Morris, Sam Crafter and a few others have well-paying jobs heading agencies that never existed prior to the last election, and how many FTEs are within those agencies? These are all questions that we will certainly be asking tomorrow.

We have had, though, significant expenditure in health, yet the Labor Party has delivered record ramping and resorted to trying to switch out the target metric such is their confidence in themselves that they will fix the ramping crisis. This blowout in spending is simply extraordinary. We will have more details tomorrow regarding the exact scale of the blowout once we can conclusively add the additional taxation revenue to the lost surplus and the gained deficit, but I suspect the true blowout is much more than the Treasurer has initially admitted to on the back of infrastructure blowouts, departmental overspend and savings tasks that simply were not achieved.

In just six months, this Treasurer has gone from press release headlines stating that his Mid-Year Budget Review delivers on his surplus to headlines in The Advertiser, including,'Stephen blows the budget', and 'Funding fudge would fail maths class'. As I said a fortnight ago, the reality is that this state's finances should have been in a place to provide relief to all South Australians who need it—typical hardworking South Australian households—through energy rebates.

With an unanticipated GST windfall and historic tax revenue due to inflation, this government should have been in a place to help more South Australians. It has not been a good couple of weeks for the Treasurer. He often likes to talk about D-grade performances; well, his financial mismanagement effort this year certainly does not even meet that grade.

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