Page 3139 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 15 September 1993
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I ask the Chief Minister: What is so difficult about embracing business? After all, government is just a big business conglomerate. Big, yes; a conglomerate, yes; but business nevertheless. Why not take heed of the people who are actually out there and who know how to sell in a difficult economic environment to the customers, to the electorate? Madam Speaker, I give a warning to this Government that, if it does not act and look after the business community, this side certainly will. At the next election we will communicate vigorously with business and listen to its voice.
MR KAINE (4.53): Madam Speaker, I would like to add a few comments to what has been said already in response to this report. It is timely that we are discussing it today because only yesterday the Government brought down a budget that did little to provide assistance to our local business community and did even less to produce any jobs. I think, Madam Speaker, that there are few matters more crucial to our future well-being in the ACT than business development here. It is the private sector that is going to create the jobs, and it is the private sector that is going to generate the future revenues of this Territory.
Madam Speaker, by definition, development is something that is going to happen in the future. You can forget what has happened in the past. Indeed, very little has happened in the past. It is very interesting that the Chief Minister has within her own organisation an Economic Development Division which employs a quite large number of people. You have to ask: What have they done over the last four years of self-government? What have those people contributed to economic development in the Territory? Where is the industry that they have generated? Where is the business that has resulted from what they have done?
When the Government gets their back up against the wall they have to employ somebody like these people - eminent people, certainly - to tell them what they should be doing. One could easily argue, I think, that, on its record, we could do away with the Economic Development Division and ask these people to give the Government some advice from time to time, and we would be a lot better off. Government really can contribute to business only by creating an environment in which the private sector can thrive. But, again, the Government is not doing anything about that. We hear a lot of rhetoric about it, but we do not see much.
I would have to say that business is not about making government feel good. One gets the impression sometimes when one hears the Chief Minister speaking that that is what it is all about, and that she can claim the credit for all of the things that the private sector is doing. Business is about creating new wealth from natural resources and human labour, about converting goods and services and adding value, and then competing in the market. We are not doing that in the ACT. Part of the objective in setting up the South East Economic Development Council, which, I remind this Assembly, Nick Greiner and I set up, was to identify those natural resources in this region where we could add the value and we could create the jobs that would flow from that, rather than exporting it to Japan or somewhere else. Now, three years downstream, this Government has not yet taken a single recommendation from the South East Economic Development Council and turned it into something practical. I ask again: What is the Economic Development Division of the Chief Minister's Department doing? Why is it not picking these things up and why is the Government not doing something practical about them?
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