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April 22nd, 2013 
Peter Nolan
Updated
The WA Treasurer Troy Buswell says Australian states with weak economies should not be propped up with federal funding at the expense of Western Australia.
A new Commsec report has ranked WA as the country’s best performing economy while Tasmania is one of the weakest, and the gap appears to be widening.
It says weak states could improve their economic performance with assistance from the Commonwealth.
Mr Buswell says that help should not come in the form of extra GST allocations.
“The thing these reports continually highlight to me is the flawed process of GST distributions in this country whereby states likes ours that are growing strongly and supporting investment and jobs growth across the nation are effectively propping up states like Tasmania,” he said.
“I think penalising growth states like WA to prop up basket cases likes Tasmania is not the way to progress in the national interest, while acknowledging there may be requirements for the Commonwealth in other ways to support states like Tasmania.”
The federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says he will do the right thing by Western Australia if he wins the September election, but he will not be intervening to secure the state a greater share of GST.
The WA Premier Colin Barnett was furious earlier this year when the state’s share of the GST fell below 50 cents in the dollar for the first time.
Mr Abbott says reforming the GST is a matter for the states.
“My plan for Western Australia is abolish the carbon tax, abolish the mining tax, and restore the Australian Building and Construction Commission,” he said.
“This will massively improve the economy of Western Australia.”
Infrastructure demands
The Commsec report ranks the Northern Territory in second place, suggesting the resource-rich regions are continuing to dominate.
An economist at CommSec, Savanth Sebastian, says WA and the Northern Territory are going from strength to strength.
“Where Western Australia was the strongest was around retail trade, equipment investment and population growth, and it really wasn’t far behind in terms of even economic growth,” he said.
“So it just highlights that resource states are clearly driving the momentum story across the Australian economy and really will be at the forefront of growth over the next year.”
The growth has seen a flood in the number of people arriving in WA putting pressure on infrastructure with public transport such as rail filled to capacity and struggling to cope.
The State Government responded by proposing the MAX light rail plan and an airport rail line, which are reliant on the Commonwealth contributing $3 billion.
However, the Prime Minister Julia Gillard has previously refused to give any guarantees and Mr Abbott has said the Commonwealth does not have a history of funding rail.
Today, the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, cast further doubt on Commonwealth funding by saying rail projects are primarily state matters.
“I don’t want to set up a whole new bureaucracy to second-guess the state government on where rail should go and how public transport should be operated,” he said.
“If there’s more roads we can fund in Western Australia to help Western Australia with some of the challenges of a thousand people coming every week we will look at that, we sure will.”
The WA Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Ryan Buckland says the large discrepancy between the economic situation of each state poses a significant challenge for the Federal Government.
“There are limited things that government and policy makers can do because their instruments are very broad based so they can only target the average rather than targeting specific jurisdictions,” he said.
Topics:
government-and-politics,
federal—state-issues,
tax,
perth-6000,
hobart-7000
First posted
Source Article from http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-22/buswell-says-wa-should-not-be-propping-up-others/4643762
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