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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (14 May) . . Page.. 1392 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

I believe that the Canberra Cosmos are a very important part of the sporting community in Canberra. I think it is important that we have national teams operating at that level. This is by no means a grant to the Cosmos; it is a guarantee on a loan. We have a full business case from the Canberra Cosmos. That was done after a very large amount of work to ensure that the Canberra Cosmos, we hope, would not have to draw on the guarantee and, if they did, would be in a position to pay it back. All of that work has been done to make the Government confident that this sort of guarantee is in the best interests of the Canberra community generally and the Cosmos particularly.

Mr Moore: Whose decision was it?

MRS CARNELL: The decision was taken by Cabinet.

MR OSBORNE: I ask a supplementary question. Thank you for that, Mrs Carnell. I am pleased that the previous Government did look after the Raiders. If they had not, I may not have come down.

MR SPEAKER: Are you having a private conversation or do you have a supplementary question, Mr Osborne?

MR OSBORNE: Mrs Carnell, now that you have set the precedent for providing direct financial assistance to what is essentially a private business, how are you going to turn down similar requests from other private businesses in Canberra, for example, the owners of local shops?

MRS CARNELL: We are not giving out a grant here. This is a guarantee on a loan for the Cosmos. When we are going down the path of $12m for an upgrade to Bruce Stadium which will significantly benefit the Canberra Raiders, the Brumbies and others, it is a bit rich for Mr Osborne to make such comments here. In terms of local shops, which was the question Mr Osborne asked, in the budget that we bought down last week we had a number of programs for local shops. In fact, we had $500,000 for the helpShop Fund, which will make money available to local shops to enable them to upgrade their facilities, to do something about painting and signage - in other words, sprucing up their facilities generally.

For shopping centre owners and local shops that decide that they want to upgrade their centres, we have opportunities for deferral of rates and land tax for the period of the upgrade. That is a fairly good underwriting of a project, Mr Osborne. On top of that, there is $4.5m in the housing budget for medium-density development for APUs and so on around local shopping centres, to give them some sort of a show. In comparison to a $200,000 guarantee, $4.5m for public housing, rates and land tax holidays during redevelopment, $500,000 for helpShop and the amount of money for precinct management sound all right to me.

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