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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (10 December) . . Page.. 4625 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

involve the Commonwealth of Australia in the plan. It would take them with it. It would ensure that they were part of the consensus. After all, they are the largest employer in the Territory, employing about a third of our work force. After all, they have significant planning interests in the Territory through Commonwealth land and designated land. After all, it is the nation's capital and it ought to be something that the Commonwealth of Australia takes a key interest in, ensuring that Canberra remains as a point of pride, a good place to live and a model for the future. A real strategic plan would have proper priorities and strategies for implementing some of the goals set out in the plan. This so-called strategic plan simply does not do any of these things.

I want to touch on a couple of my concerns with this plan. First, this plan and this Government send fundamentally contradictory messages to the Canberra community. On the one hand, they say, "Our economic future is rosy. We have a great future in this Territory". Mr De Domenico said in question time, "We are going to talk the economy up". With that language they seem to promise prosperity; they seem to promise an optimistic future. Yet in this plan and in the rhetoric of the Government they do something contradictory to that. They preach despair. They preach reduced levels of service. They preach again and again that you cannot have what you want; that you are not going to get the services that you have come to expect; that you are living beyond your means. These are fundamentally contradictory messages - one of prosperity and one of poverty. The Government cannot succeed until it can resolve that contradiction in its own mind.

Another concern of mine with this plan is its apparent contradiction when it says, "We cannot afford services. We have an affordability gap. We are in real trouble". However, when you turn the page it talks about an obvious opportunity to make the ACT a more attractive place to do business by pitching taxes and charges below those in New South Wales. That is, it is saying, "We do not have the money to provide you citizens with the services that you expect, but we do have the money to give tax breaks to business". That is a fundamental contradiction, a real problem for this report and for building the consensus necessary for this report.

A curious example of the contradictions in this report is the rhetoric about the importance of Commonwealth involvement in this report and of taking the Commonwealth with us. It says, "Foster the relationship with the national government". Then when you turn the page, it says:

Given the potential impact of ... `downsizing' on the Canberra economy, a great deal of additional work needs to be done on the underlying drivers in order to better anticipate the nature of the future reform.

That is a bit confusing. The Government should tell us how many more jobs they are going to cut and how many more investment projects in the national capital they are going to shelve. The report goes on to say:

This research should be undertaken by the Commonwealth ...

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