Page 1331 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 12 May 2021
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Governments across Australia, at the commonwealth, state and territory level, are embracing expansionary fiscal policy at this time. There is reason for confidence that this will accelerate the recovery of national, state and territory economies. The ACT government will step up to fund the health, transport, education, climate and community infrastructure that our city needs, whilst keeping Canberrans in sustainable jobs. We will continue to make major productivity- and sustainability-improving investments. We did so in the first budget of this term, which has just passed, and I foreshadow that we will seek to reinforce these efforts in the second budget of this calendar year, to be delivered in August. That has been our consistent priority for ACT government expenditure over the last six years, and it is one that has become even more important to implement over the last year.
It is long past time for the commonwealth to deliver funding for major projects and institutions in the ACT—funding that seems to flow so readily to marginal electorates around the country. I have been heartened, in the last few months, that the commonwealth has begun to recognise how important the ACT is for our broader region. We are an essential health, education and economic hub, not only for the ACT, obviously, but for southern New South Wales, and the national capital is the focal point of the nation.
I sincerely appreciate the commonwealth government’s recognition that Canberra’s light rail system is a system worth investing in. Could I declare today a hope that the light rail wars that have been a feature of territory politics for more than a decade might finally be over. Even now, with the commonwealth partnering with us to the tune of nearly $133 million on the next stage of the project, the question will be: will the Canberra Liberals admit that their bitter opposition over the last decade or more might have been an error? Time will tell.
The commonwealth government’s commitment to fund long-overdue capital works upgrades at our city’s national cultural institutions and to provide some additional support for their operations is another positive step in the right direction for our critical national cultural institutions. They are also important tourism drivers for our region. They are institutions that have suffered many years of cuts. My hope is that this funding will assist these institutions to recover from the economic impacts of COVID, to sustain local jobs and bring new visitors to our city.
Looking to the future, it is disappointing that the commonwealth did not take the opportunity in the budget to prioritise the construction of dedicated national quarantine facilities to support Australia’s ongoing repatriation efforts to get our citizens home from high-risk countries. The hotel quarantine program is costly. Hotels are not purpose-built quarantine facilities. The best practice requirements that are necessary have significantly limited the number of hotels that are able, willing and capable of supporting such a high-risk program.
Hotels in Australia were not built to be quarantine facilities. They are unsuited to quarantine arrangements. The repeated hotel outbreaks—another one in the last 24 hours—despite the best precautions continue to show that these are not fit-for-purpose facilities. As domestic travel increases, the pressure on city-based hotels as the
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