Former ACT chief minister Stanhope takes aim at Andrew Barr

Former ACT chief minister Jon Stanhope has accused Andrew Barr of sinking the territory into debt, hiking taxes and overseeing a ‘health crisis’.

Jon Stanhope and then deputy PM Julia Gillard at the naming of a new school in 2009.

Former ACT chief minister Jon Stanhope has waged a sustained attack on the Labor-Greens government, accusing Chief Minister Andrew Barr of sinking the Territory into debt, hiking taxes and overseeing a “health crisis”.

The last Labor leader in the ACT to govern with a majority has been running a campaign against his former party in a series of analysis pieces in the Canberra City News, criticising the party for its financial track record and lack of transparency about the state of the Territory budget.

Often collaborating with former ACT Treasury official Khalid Ahmed, Mr Stanhope has lashed the ACT government for its mismanagement of the health system, which he has linked to the highly publicised deaths of at least two young children at the Canberra Hospital.

“We have ascribed the central cause of that ‘crisis’ to ongoing and persistent cuts, in real terms, to health funding and an associated shift in funding policy for healthcare,” the pair said in one column.

In another article, they wrote that the ACT government had become the “only jurisdiction in Australia to cut health expenditure” through the series of real cuts in spending compared to demand.

“Over the four-year period that the growth in health expenditure averaged 1.4 per cent in real terms, the population grew, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, by 2.4 per cent a year,” they said.

“In other words, health funding per person, in the ACT, is currently lower than it was seven years ago.

“The impacts of the persistent funding cuts have been severe. Emergency department performance in treating patients on time, once better than the national average, is now the worst in Australia.”

In another critique of the Barr government’s financial management and the Territory’s loss of its AAA credit rating, Mr Stanhope and Dr Ahmed noted the government’s “massive increase in debt”.

“For Canberra residents, most particularly the less well off, the loss of the AAA rating has real consequences,” they said.

“The burden of the ACT government’s taxation measures is not distributed progressively, impacting disproportionately on people on low to moderate incomes. For example, cuts in health care are particularly inequitable.”

Mr Stanhope after announcing his retirement in 2011.

Mr Stanhope and Dr Ahmed also said the rating downgrade was “irrefutable evidence that the ­fiscal strategy adopted by the ACT government is flawed”.

They also accused the ACT government of fudging its budget figures in media releases, devoting a series of columns to unpicking Mr Barr’s claims forecasting “an improvement in the operating budget”.

“The ACT’s balance sheet is far from stable. In fact, the budget and forward estimates reflect the continuation of a trend that commenced more than a decade earlier,” they said.

“Deterioration of this scale in the ACT’s balance sheet can, in our opinion, in no way be seriously claimed to reflect a commitment to sound financial management.”

The duo has also raised the alarm about the spiralling interest bill in the Territory’s debt, and flagged that the ACT would move to tax Canberrans to make up their losses.

“To put it in perspective, the 2023-24 budget forecasts an increase in net debt at the rate of $3.2m every day including weekends and Easter and Christmas holidays,” they said.

“Over this period, interest costs will increase from $250m to $595m annually.

“In fact, the 2023-24 forecast in the budget review reflected a cut of 0.3 per cent in nominal terms. Considering these cuts, the government had no option but to either increase expenditure or cut services. In the former case, taxes would need to increase, or the operating deficit would be worse than published. Unsurprisingly, that is what’s happened.”

They have also criticised the ACT government for investing heavily in the light rail, arguing that the “business case was prepared well after the political and policy commitments to the project had already been made” and it was difficult to see how the project was “diversifying the economy”.