Page 4001 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 23 November 1993
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bother running presentation and awards nights for business and small business when it does not even give the locals a chance at supplying some of its goods and services? How can local businesses possibly prove themselves if they are not given a chance? Local businesses do not require handouts, but they do require an opportunity to quote. They require an opportunity to show that they are equal to, or better than, their interstate counterparts. This Government would be pleasantly surprised at the underlying quality of our local business people.
With this in mind, I ask the Minister for Urban Services for information on staffing numbers at the Supply and Tender Agency, whether the agency has compiled the various registers to enable the calling of tenders by local - I repeat "local" - as well as interstate organisations and when we can expect the agency to be fully operational. This agency was established in 1992 and has certainly produced a very nice and fancy brochure to give details of the agency; yet here we are, almost at the end of a full year, and it still has not compiled a total register and, I believe, sports only one full-time member of staff.
I know of case after case where the locals have been ignored in favour of interstate firms. We have all heard of the recent complaints by Rob Milliken of Sontec, who installed the audiovisual system in the present Assembly building and the new Parliament House on the hill yet was not considered good enough to quote for the new Assembly building. I would have thought that it was no small feat for a company that is told that it is too small to carry out the installation in the new Assembly building to boast that it has undertaken very successfully some much larger jobs in Canberra. It does not take many guesses to discover that the company selected to carry out the installation of the audiovisual system in the new Assembly building is from interstate.
This is a government that gives with one hand and reaches out and snatches back with two hands. In a letter to Professor Gruen, in his capacity as chairman of the ACT Economic Priorities Advisory Committee, George Snow confirmed his resignation from EPACT and stated that a requirement for government is to deliver the appropriate level of services efficiently and effectively, thereby being within a fiscal framework that is conducive to economic expansion. Mr Snow went on to state some of the increases that have occurred in general rates, land taxes, payroll taxes, stamp duties, motor vehicle insurance and taxes on share transfers.
You would think that a government that collects these sorts of rates and taxes from businesses would at least try to do some business with them, so that it in turn can extract even more taxes from local businesses. The Government's attitude is hardly surprising when, through its Business Forum, it has had only about one meeting in the last year. It is certainly not at all conducive to attracting prospective interstate businesses to Canberra, particularly when it does not support existing local businesses.
It is hardly a conducive atmosphere in light of the Government's most recent attempt to attract and encourage national associations to make the move to Canberra - it has joined forces with a prominent ACT law firm to run seminars in Melbourne and Sydney, not locally! Jim Service, in his recent address to the Canberra Business Council's annual general meeting on the subject "Canberra, Model for Australia", criticised the Government for its short-sightedness in putting together a plan for the future of Canberra in the year 2020. But what is the point of having strategies for the year 2020 when it cannot even achieve its strategies today, in this year, 1993?
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