Page 2456 - Week 07 - Thursday, 4 August 2022
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reflected in this budget, in part through the $11.5 million to help address the over-representation of Indigenous people in the justice system.
The programs included in this package respond to calls from the community to help address structural issues that First Nations people in the ACT face. For example, we know and understand that we need to address the social determinants of crime, and that is why we are expanding funding to the Yarrabi Bamirr program, to help families stay together and develop good mutual support for each other. And we understand that sentencing and bail decisions need an enhanced cultural lens, so we are increasing funding for the Galambany circle sentencing court. It is a comprehensive suite of programs, which makes me optimistic about the government’s ambitious commitment to reach parity in incarceration rates by 2031.
I also want to single out the funding that is going to develop a social recovery framework for Canberra. This is to ensure that we have a plan for community recovery from COVID, as well as the 2019-20 bushfires. It will also help the community to be prepared for the increased storms, fires, droughts and other impacts of climate change in our future. This is investment that acknowledges the reality of our future. Support for resilience and recovery will need to be ongoing. This is the paradigm we exist in, as our national leaders still fail to take the action on climate change that is necessary and where, as my federal colleagues have said, our federal Labor government is wedded to an insufficient 43 per cent emissions reduction target that is, to quote their razor-sharp analysis, akin to throwing a bucket of water at a house fire.
These investments to help the vulnerable and struggling in our society, never seem enough. There is always more that we can do to help. This leads me to a particular element of this budget that the Greens do not support. I signal now that there is a spending proposal that the Greens will vote against. This is the proposal in the budget to provide an almost $40 million subsidy to the horseracing industry over the next five years. The $40 million is proposed despite the fact that the Independent Competition and Regulatory Commission recommended 11 years ago that the ACT industry should be self-sufficient within in a decade. Yet there does seem to be a majority view in this place to continue paying the industry tens of millions of dollars—or even more if, Mr Parton had his way!—at a time when that money could be spent so well elsewhere.
My colleague Jo Clay has brought this issue to the public’s attention and has received a great deal of public support. The budget is supposed to reflect what we value as a community and the future we want to build together. I am confident that the community would prefer this $40 million to go to public housing and homelessness or mental health support or climate change adaptation or public transport or a hundred other things. We should be using this money to invest in issues that will help Canberrans now and into the future.
In conclusion, I reiterate that the Greens support this budget. Even if there are some elements we would do differently, and even though we will explicitly vote against one element, we support its important investments. We need budgets that courageously make long-term investments that care for people, address inequalities and injustices and respond to climate change—policies like the transition to a society that uses clean and affordable renewable energy; the transition to clean electric vehicles; record investment in addressing homelessness and growing housing; expanded mental
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