Page 1552 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 18 May 1993
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MR WESTENDE (9.17): I have only a few comments to make in this debate. I am all for planning for the future. It is absolutely essential. We need to know as a community what we are aiming for. We need to know how we want things to be. However, we have to be careful. It is always much more interesting to talk about the future than to focus on the present. While laying down a plan is important, the issues that face us now are a part of that. If we do not respond decisively to the issues that confront us now, there will not be a future.
It is largely what we do now that determines what sort of future we are going to have. To give an example, the very last sentence of issues paper No. 10, "Economic Development and Employment", states:
Significant diversification of the economy, and the development of an export orientation will be crucial to developing a healthy economy and sustained job growth.
What a prediction! Unless we export now, we are absolutely on our knees. How can we talk about having to develop an export orientation in 2020 unless we do it now? As Mr Kaine so eloquently put it, technology changes every so often. In the industry I am connected with, you would have to replace your equipment every four years - not because the equipment was worn out but because the technology had changed. If you want to be up to date, you would have to change your equipment. That means that by 2020 I will have had to change it six times, so how can I predict what my output will be between now and 2020?
It is a mistake to see this export orientation as something achievable in the distant future. Policies to encourage businesses of this nature need to be set in place now. It is not good enough to say, "Wouldn't this be a good thing to do?". Governments have been talking about the importance of developing export oriented industry for years and years. This is not a new thought. However, when one is still reading this in papers years after it was first mooted, one has to ask why it is that it still seems like a novel idea. It could mean that governments and private enterprise have not responded strongly enough to the call.
It is true that the recession has demanded that a restructuring process occur, and this has happened to some extent. Businesses have become more competitive. However, the Government also needs to be sensitive to the requirements of business for industry to be able to look forward and take risks. While we have governments that see business more as a source of revenue than as a means of providing a future for our country, industry will not move forward. It will not have the confidence to move forward and, before long, the year 2020 will be upon us and we will still be talking about the brave new world instead of being part of it.
Mr Deputy Speaker, nowhere have I seen in the documents in the Canberra in the Year 2020 study, and I went right through them, any reference to reducing or abolishing taxes. Nowhere have I seen any evidence of a proposal that would attract industry to Canberra or the ACT. Nowhere have I seen evidence of any input from the business world into the forward-thinking process involved in this study. For this study to have any credibility, it must show that it can be flexible
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