Page 294 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 12 May 1992
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MR WESTENDE: Madam Speaker, I ask for permission to make a personal explanation.
MADAM SPEAKER: Yes, Mr Westende.
MR WESTENDE: I will read from my two paragraphs that I quoted. I said that, in the city with the largest per capita income, 13 per cent of our domestic dwellings are publicly owned, while the average in the rest of Australia is 5 per cent. I then carried on to say: Could not some of these dwellings be sold to longstanding tenants, to the benefit of both the tenant and the Government?
MRS CARNELL (9.42): The Chief Minister's statement on the program for the third Labor Government is notable more for what it does not say than for what is actually contained in her speech. Her comments are full of platitudes and motherhood statements, with very little new direction or new policy to lead the ACT out of its current malaise. If this statement is, as Ms Follett says, the basis for judging her Government's performance over the next three years, it would appear that there will be very little for the people of Canberra to judge her by. Most of her more positive statements are really reports upon the progress of decisions and projects started under the Alliance Government. It is fascinating to hear the Chief Minister promise a better, more efficient health system, something that is now possible only because of the hospital redevelopment project - an Alliance initiative that Ms Follett strongly opposed.
Ms Follett alludes to the problems that the ACT is experiencing due to cuts in Grants Commission funding, but she gives no confidence that she has any plans for overcoming this difficulty. She claims that she wants to make the most efficient use of our assets, but at the same time she has virtually ignored the Else-Mitchell report and has scrapped most of the micro-economic reforms proposed by the Priorities Review Board.
Mr Kaine: All of them.
MRS CARNELL: All of the micro-economic reforms proposed. She attacks the Federal coalition's consumption tax proposal but conveniently overlooks the fact that the GST is only part of a wide-ranging Fightback package. Under Fightback, wholesale sales tax will be abolished, payroll tax will be abolished, and the fuel excise will go. These are just some of the taxes that will disappear under Fightback. Fightback will greatly reduce the tax pressure on business, allowing sustainable jobs to be created.
Ms Follett's reliance on Jobskills programs to fight unemployment cannot succeed unless business is in the position to provide real long-term jobs. Her solutions to youth unemployment and the very real problems currently being experienced by women in our work force are shallow in the extreme. They are almost as useless to the ACT as Keating's One Nation package. There are not a lot of railways or highways being built in the ACT.
Mr De Domenico: Or ports.
MRS CARNELL: Or ports. There are very few jobs for women on these projects. The abolition of the fuel excise will provide the capacity for ACT business to compete in the wider arena, as well as decreasing freight costs into the ACT, thus reducing prices. The coalition's proposal to out-source a number of functions
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