Page 1821 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 19 August 1992
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Mr Kaine's motion - I am delighted that the Government is going to support it - notes that Melbourne elected more members of the Federal Government at the last Federal election than Canberra did, as did Western Australia, Tasmania and everywhere else. What this Assembly did - once again it was a positive move, Mr Deputy Speaker - was to vote in a specialist committee, namely the Tourism and ACT Promotion Committee, which I gladly chair, to look at this very thing because we are concerned about what is thought of us outside the ACT. I have heard of all sorts of surveys saying that the people who have been here think it is a grand old place. I am not concerned about the people who have been here, Mr Deputy Speaker; I am concerned about the majority of Australians in your Coburgs, Maribyrnongs and Parramattas who perhaps cannot afford to come to the ACT. We know what they think; they think what they read in newspapers, watch on television and listen to on the radio. Their perception of the ACT, as Mr Kaine suggested, is like that of Mr Dollis, the member for Richmond in Victoria, who said that we have no unemployment, no recession, and security of employment.
As Mr Kaine quite ably put it, and as Mr Berry would agree, seeing that our unemployment level is 8.4 per cent, of course there is unemployment in the ACT. I might add that Mr Berry was slightly political. I am not digressing, Mr Deputy Speaker, because Mr Kaine mentioned the unemployment situation. There is unemployment in the ACT. What Mr Dollis fails to realise is that it was his Federal colleague Mr Keating, who had eight years as Treasurer and now has had one year as Prime Minister, who gave us the unemployment. It was Mr Keating and the Labor Government - not the people of Canberra or the people of the ACT, but members of the Federal Parliament, a majority of whom are Labor members, unfortunately, at this stage. That will not be so in the future. They are the ones who have given us unemployment, Mr Berry, not the people of the ACT.
Mr Dollis went on to say that the ACT has no recession. Once again, if Mr Dollis were to travel to Canberra and to see all the small businesses going out of business and the commensurate unemployment that goes with that, he would also realise that of course there is a recession in the ACT. I say to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, that that recession, the one we had to have, once again was not created by the people of the ACT; it was given to us wilfully by a Federal government. I also suggest to you, Mr Deputy Speaker - I am sure you are aware of it - that for the past 10 years that Federal Government happens to have been a Labor Government. So it was not the people of the ACT who gave us the recession; it was the Federal Labor Government.
The other thing that was alluded to in the story in the Age newspaper which we are talking about, Mr Deputy Speaker, was that Mr Dollis, the Labor member for Richmond, said that everybody in the ACT has secure employment. Well, a few hundred people at the Industry Commission that is now going to go to Melbourne do not have secure employment, and the 8.4 per cent who are currently unemployed do not have secure employment. Nobody in this country at the minute, with our current economic woes, can say that they have secure employment. Once again I suggest to Mr Dollis and the Age newspaper, and anybody else who wants to criticise the ACT, that that so-called insecurity is not the fault of the people and the electors in the ACT. Once again, let us put the blame where it is due, and that is on the Federal Government - and it happens to be a Federal Labor Government.
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