Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)

The truth is that the Government has been at the heart of the many problems we must now confront, such as the low performance in public service. The Minister has been at the heart of decisions such as that on decentralisation, the establishment of the Health Service Executive without reforming the structures, the decision to pay out benchmarking awards without getting reform, and the decision to have strategy statements for which no one would be responsible when they fail. In the process it has undermined and demoralised a highly committed public service.

In terms of the Minister leading the public service reform, how much more time does he need? The Taoiseach was Minister for Finance for four years, or 72 months. He had the opportunity to reform the public service and he did nothing about it. How can we now believe that the Minister has been transformed and that he has a vision of a high performance public service, with people rewarded for success and accountable for failure? We do not see it in his actions, and it is very hard to believe he will do it now.

How can we believe that the Minister will confront power in the banks when he has been at the heart of the web of cosy relationships that undermined proper scrutiny of the way our banks were being run? How can we believe that he will confront competitiveness when he has been at the heart of settling with big, powerful public utilities instead of confronting their obligation to perform to the highest international standards to provide utilities that are competitive with the standards in other countries? People do not believe the Minister can confront those problems because he has not confronted them during the years of inactivity in office.

The choices we make in this budget can shorten or lengthen the prospects of this recession. The sort of choices the Minister made last year lengthened it. He sought €6 billion in extra taxes. All international evidence tells us that to attempt to focus all the adjustment on the tax side is doomed to failure. It condemns thriving businesses to ruin. Whereas by contrast, if the Minister were willing to confront the cost of delivering public service, rationalising the system, delivering value and rooting out waste he would give a positive signal that would create a buzz within the economy. Yet he took the other route.

If, as he did in previous budgets, the Minister focuses on cutting front-line entitlements while leaving the bureaucracy intact, that will fail and will lengthen the recession. If he slashes investment for infrastructure, as he did last year, and it would seem he proposes to commit to another €750 million cut in our investment, that means that the infrastructure we need to build competition for the future is undermined. This is not the time to cut investment. This is the time to make room for investment by making our savings elsewhere but the Minister is persisting in taking measures that lengthen rather than shorten the recession.

The Minister's banking solution, relying as it does on a huge gamble for the tax payer that has little guarantee it will get credit flowing, is another example of a decision that will prolong the recession. It will leave us with a legacy of high property prices while not confronting the change that must happen and it fails to confront the professional investors in the banks with the losses they must take. Instead, the taxpayer is asked to shoulder the burden for the years to come.

We must look at this budget as an opportunity to make decisions that will strengthen our ability to recover and that will have employment at its heart. We propose a cut in employers' PRSI, halving the lower rate and cutting the ordinary rate by 2%. We will fund that by extending the PRSI ceiling and removing the allowances at the bottom. We will also fund it by a carbon tax and by a windfall tax in respect of energy. That move, which would reduce employers' costs by 2.5%, would create, according to the ESRI predictions, 30,000 jobs over time. That is the way to go. We must give every employer who is now struggling against an overvalued currency and excessive costs in services, many of them created and run by the Government, a break.

We have been around the country, visiting five cities, and we are heading to Athlone next week and that is the cry that is coming out. Businesses are hanging on by their fingernails, finding it impossible to get credit and finding the costs too difficult to sustain. They need relief and we must give them it in this budget.

With proper reform we can attract private sector investment to invest in electricity, telecommunications, water, energy saving and forestry infrastructure that we need for the future. We can attract private investment into those areas if we are willing to run them on a strictly commercial basis, if we are willing to put equity into them and if we are willing to raise a national recovery bond and money from pension funds that are crying out for an opportunity.

We can come up with extra investment strategies instead of solely relying on the Exchequer's public capital programme. We could attract €11 billion into investment that will be there for the long-term and that will make us the envy of other countries, with high speed broadband, a smart electricity grid and a water system that does not see 40% of the water flushed down the drain in leakage. We must use this opportunity to create that infrastructure for growth for the future and that is what this budget must be about.

Of course I recognise, as everyone recognises, that in doing these things we face a financial constraint. I accept that €4 billion must be found this year. I also accept that we must find €1.3 billion savings on the public service pay bill. I accept that we cannot leave even the social welfare bill immune, although we must seek to protect as many as possible. We must accept large swathes of the McCarthy report, particularly those aspects that emphasise rationalising agencies and reducing the administrative burden we are carrying that is not delivering at the frontline. We will set out our budget as an alternative, as to how we will square the books.

Let us not, however, pretend that this debate is about finding cuts of €4 billion or raising taxes. It is about our being willing to confront those changes, particularly the way we fund our public services. The Minister came into this House and pretended the McCarthy report would transform the way we do business. That is not the case. Look at the Estimate volume in front of the Minister. We are presenting existing levels of service as if what was done last year has some sacrosanct right to remain in existence. There is no right during this crisis for any agency to expect the money it got last year. Agencies must be made to bid for their money on the basis of the performance they will deliver. They must be accountable for the performance they deliver. When they say they will deliver something, they must do so or be held accountable for the consequences. They must be given the tools, as managers, to make decisions, to change the way they spend their money.

We would be further on if we knew from the Government how it intends to move people from one agency to another. There is still no system for that. We would be moving on if we knew what we were going to do when an agency is rationalised and some people are no longer needed. What system would there be to redeploy them or to pay them off if they must be let go? We do not have that from the Minister.

It would be an interesting if the Government said how it would manage change, how it would go about closing agencies that are no longer performing, how it would move people from areas that are wasteful. We are told there are 6,000 wasteful administrative posts in the HSE. How will we move them to frontline services that need support?

The Tánaiste tells us that many of the proposals in the McCarthy report are rubbish. We would be interested to hear the Minister's analysis of which ones are rubbish and his analysis of the impact of the different changes that have been allocated by the report on public service delivery. Then we could have a real engagement. This, however, is the usual dialogue of the deaf the Minister and his predecessor have gone on with, thinking they can come into the Dáil with a list of numbers while offering no performance as to what those numbers will deliver next year if we agree to them. That is rubbish.

The Minister must insist the agencies and the spending Departments say what they will do with their budgets. We want to see those managers report quarterly on their performance against those targets. If we were ushering that system as part of our response to this crisis, there would be some sense of hope that at last a Government is willing to hold management accountable while being accountable itself, with Ministers held accountable for what they deliver.

We have not seen that. Time and again the Government offers a strategy and when it fails, no one turns up. They are all there for the glossy launch, when there is a press conference and a beautiful slide presentation, but there is no one there when nothing is delivered at the end, when there is no primary care system, as was promised eight years ago, when there is no impact on climate change, as was promised eight years ago. No one is there to own up for the responsibility, although I take my hat off to my former county colleague, at least he admitted the Government had failed in respect of its climate strategy. That is at least a recognition that someone in Government has an inkling of what it is to deliver professional standards.

Yes, we are facing into a tough budget but we must hold out the prospect for the young people who are feeling the impact. We make no apology for saying we cannot touch child benefit. We cannot touch it because both the boom and the bust have hit young families hardest. The explosion in house prices was a direct transfer from young people trying to get on to the housing ladder to older people, who saw the benefits of selling homes. Young people are the ones who are suffering negative equity, bearing the major burdens.

Those young people are the first hit when companies are in trouble. We must defend those people and protect them as best we can. Child benefit is one recognition that young families must be supported. Every other country in the world tries to provide support to those bringing up the next generation and we must be no different.

This is an opportunity. Rarely is there a crisis in which there is a willingness on the part of everyone to contribute but we must have a vision people can support but that vision is not coming. It is not there in the sad script delivered from a word processor in the Department of Finance.

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