Michael Ferguson,Minister for Finance
Rebecca White's piece in today's Examiner is yet another embarrassing demonstration of her complete lack of economic and leadership credibility.
While Ms White has been in hiding and is flummoxed by the ongoing turmoil raging inside Labor, and is unable to lead her divided and defeated party, that is no excuse for making basic errors and misleading the community in the newspaper.
Among Ms White's howlers were:
- Claiming that Tasmanian wages are $400 lower off every week, and $11,000 lower annually – simple maths would tell her this cannot be correct. Either she is deliberating inflating this number, or she simply can't add up. Ms White also fails to mention that Tasmanian wage growth over the last year is the highest in the country, according to the ABS Wage Price Index;
- Claiming Tasmania has the highest power bills in the country – despite power prices decreasing by 18 per cent for residential customers, and by 27 per cent for small business customers since the 2014 election. Ms White seems to have forgotten power prices skyrocketed under the Labor-Green Government; and
- Conveniently failing to mention TasWater prices were frozen during the financial year 2019-20, and the price freeze was extended for residential and business customers for the financial year 2020-21 as part of the Government's COVID-19 community support package.
Unfortunately, misleading and blatantly wrong statements are now a pattern of behaviour for Ms White, having previously claimed in her Budget reply speech that car registration and power costs had "skyrocketed" under the Liberals – completely false – and being forced to correct the record in Parliament after falsely claiming that the Finance Minister had described the Government's earlier support package for businesses as "adequate".
Ms White should correct the record and apologise for once again misleading Tasmanians.
