Page 3464 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 25 November 1992
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Our economy needs real stimulation to create jobs. It does not need money thrown at make-work schemes to provide short-term jobs that reduce the unemployment figures for a while but leave, underlying that, a prolonged unemployment problem. Providing more training places without providing jobs at the end of that process will not help employment either, and I have said that before. Training is needed, but it is not a cure. Businesses need more real activity. Consumption needs to be responsibly encouraged, consumer confidence needs to be restored, and the Government has a major role to play in that task. But it is not playing that role. Rather, it is abdicating its responsibilities to the Federal Government, or avoiding the issue altogether and shifting blame to nebulous unexplained forces in the national and international economies. Business is not being created in the ACT, nor is it being attracted to the ACT.
I am delighted, of course, to see Optus and other new businesses coming here, but half a dozen businesses do not make a summer. It is a very modest result for literally years of work at great expense by a large division of the Chief Minister's Department, and a lot of this work started when the Chief Minister and this Government were not in place. It is not the product necessarily of their efforts, even if it can be claimed that it is a result of that work. I think Optus would have come to Canberra whether Rosemary Follett asked them to or not. We need a much greater volume of business creation and we need much more inward migration.
Where are the incentives to business to set up in the ACT? The States and the Northern Territory offer tax incentives, assistance with relocation, promotional schemes, land incentives and marketing incentives which we really cannot easily match. But they also offer firm planning, policy stability and bold expansionary vision which unfortunately we cannot match either while this Government is in place because this Government is simply moribund. The ACT merely provides, under this Follett Government, clean air, a nice environment and bright employees - not sufficient by themselves to attract business here.
Madam Speaker, those endowments are valuable and they are important to Canberra, but they are not the only incentives that business needs or values; nor will they compete with incentives provided elsewhere. Madam Speaker, there is cold comfort in having clean air if our economy is so constrained that business cannot establish itself with confidence and grow. Nor will business thrive in an economy that is highly regulated. Private enterprise, which the Government claims to support - although, as I demonstrated earlier, with some equivocation - requires flexibility and freedom to be innovative and enterprising. The value of such innovation and enterprise, so highly valued elsewhere, is stifled in the ACT under this Government. Business regulation continues to be a restriction to business growth, and the Government cannot regulate in the public interest as effectively as the market can, particularly in a city that boasts such an informed community as ours. Over-regulation is an inflexible approach.
In the budget, Madam Speaker, the Government has again failed to address unemployment and business development, and it provides no leadership in planning. Our major industry, housing and construction, has seesawed from month to month -a boom one month, a bust the next. There is no certainty and no consistency in the Government's planning policies. There has been paralysis
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