Page 1446 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 1 May 1990
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We have identified the strategies now, so that the community can see where we are going, what must be changed and, just as important, what we need to preserve and improve.
The community can see only one area that you have decided that needs to be improved, and that is the wallet of those who are already well off. Your contributions to business, as you have outlined in your strategy, are clearly not in the best interests of the whole community as we go through hard times.
Mr Collaery: Where are they? Identify them. What other contributions would there be - - -
MR SPEAKER: Order!
MR MOORE: The really hard decisions would be to look to ways of raising funds through betterment tax, Mr Collaery. You have managed a compromise, Chief Minister, with the Residents Rally, who probably did not even realise that the effects would be to have no real change to the system of paying betterment tax. The champions of the leasehold system, as they would like to be seen, and of land planning were totally outsmarted and outclassed by the Liberals in yet another area. I wonder whether they even care.
Hard decisions are about using our greatest asset to maintain what makes living in this city desirable, and there I speak of our leasehold system. Since I have spoken on this topic before, I shall not pursue it further tonight. That may surprise you.
Mr Duby: That surprises me.
MR MOORE: Perhaps you could learn the same thing. This budget strategy also fails to look for other methods of revenue raising which have not yet been levied. When you are looking for further charges you should be looking to distinguish between levies on productivity and levies on the transfer of money that has no productivity associated with it. It is not my intention to spoon-feed the Alliance, but you must look carefully at supporting manufacturing and hitting all forms of speculation with heftier charges. It is there, amongst the speculators, that you will find the vultures and the pariahs of our society. I digress a little to do what I said I would not do. One method to return some of their immoral gains is to charge that 100 per cent betterment. There are many others.
I shall now turn to negotiations with the Commonwealth. This city was designed as a government town. Whilst I applaud the notion of widening our base into the productive private sector, and that includes those businesses in the ACT who are providing support and material to the Government, we have little hope of turning Canberra into
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