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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (14 May) . . Page.. 1369 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

On Thursday, the day of my budget reply speech, the Government announced this massive turnaround on a key plank of the Government's policy. Mr Humphries said in his press release that the policy had "a limited effect on local traders and was making little difference to people's shopping habits" - something that you would not know if you had been listening to what the Greens had to say. Mr Speaker, Labor has said all along that it was an illogical policy but a policy that the Liberals were happy to plough on with in the first place.

In June last year, Mr Humphries said that this policy could be described as the first real attempt by a government in the ACT to stand up for small business. In June last year he said that the obvious beneficiary would be Canberra's locally-owned small business community which had been locked in a David and Goliath battle for its very survival with big interstate corporations. He is now walking away from this law; he is now walking away from those sentiments because his polling says that it has a problem. This is not driven by policy; this is driven by the polls.

The Government did not do its homework beforehand. The Labor Party argued that the Government should not have been introducing this law without having done the analysis to demonstrate that the policy would work. The policy was, after all, Mr Speaker, anti-competitive. It was, after all, restricting competition between players in the market. Under the national competition policy, before they did this they should have done an analysis to demonstrate that it was going to be in the public interest to do this, but they did not do their homework beforehand. This is a characteristic which we see again and again in the policy approach of this Government. They do no analysis; they do no policy work beforehand; they just plough on with something which seems like a good idea.

Who can forget Mr De Domenico's decision in the first budget to flood the ACT market with 45 taxi plates? There was no analysis of the impact of that on the taxi owners or on the community at large; it just seemed like a good idea; so plough ahead with it they did. Mr De Domenico said, "It is our job to make decisions. Never mind whether we have any analysis to back up the decision; it does not matter; it is our job to make decisions, and we made one". They wiped a third of the value off taxi plates in the ACT by that decision. Mr Speaker, look at their decision in relation to vehicle inspections. There was no analysis of the impact on vehicle safety in the ACT of that decision, no analysis of what it would do to the ACT; they just decided to do it. They made a decision, and now we are living with the consequences of that.

Mr Speaker, only yesterday we asked Mrs Carnell how she had come to the decision to have a new 100-bed private hospital on the site of the Woden Valley Hospital. She said, "We did not do any analysis of it; we did not do any market studies to justify the need for it, to substantiate the need for it or anything else like that. We just figure you put it out to tender and, if someone buys it, then it must be okay". There was no analysis. We heard yesterday in relation to their decision to auction a fast food site at Chisholm, where there are four existing fast food outlets, once again, the Government saying, "We did not do any analysis of the market and whether in the current recession it is a good time to be auctioning off a 3,000-square-metre site for a fast food takeaway; we just said, `It is on the Territory Plan; we need some money; let us auction it off. Go ahead. Plough ahead'.".

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