Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 1995 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

I just could not fix it up. I will get rid of it for the price of a three-bedroom house and somebody else can look after it". Mrs Carnell, you are a joke. You have demonstrated time and time again that you are not fearful of saying anything at all that is necessary to present a glitzy media image on any issue at all.

Let us go back to the Acton Peninsula site. You made great play about what benefit it is for the ACT. The plain fact of the matter is that that beautiful site, worth many times more than the industrial land at Kingston, was given away and you are going to spend $6m so that you can make it more attractive for the Commonwealth. I heard Mrs Carnell the other day going through the motions of deriding the Federal Government, her preferred Federal Government, over the museum site at Yarramundi. What a joke! The Liberals lied to the people of the ACT in relation to the Yarramundi site - the lot of them, every one of them. There was never any intention to do anything on that site. There was always an intention to pull the wool over the people's eyes. Mr Humphries says, "You should have read the fine print". That is what we expect from Liberals and that is what we get, so we are not shocked.

Proposed expenditure agreed to.

Part 6 - Accommodation and Property Services

Proposed expenditure - Accommodation and Property Services, $5,429,000 (comprising net cost of outputs, $1,879,000; and capital injection, $3,550,000)

MR MOORE (4.47): I think this is an appropriate time to look at the path we are going down with accommodation and property. Apart from the sale and lease-back last year, we are going down this path where the Government sees it as appropriate to live in rented accommodation and to transfer our system from owned accommodation to rented accommodation. The theories behind this are always the very opposite to the theories that we use in our own domestic situation. Many of us aspire to own our own homes rather than rent them.

The Government has gone down this path in an attempt to avoid any further borrowing. From a long-term perspective, I have real doubts about whether this is the best way to go. I have certainly seen a number of papers that the Government has been kind enough to present over a number of years, suggesting that in the long term this is cheaper. Most of those papers are dependent on the Government assigning certain costs in the first place. If you assign certain costs in the first place, then you can come out with accounting advantages afterwards. Take this Assembly Building. If we were renting this space - I believe that in principle the Assembly ought not to be dependent upon another group, but that is a separate issue - there would be a constant outflow of money without any hope of this building being owned by us in the future. That is why in their domestic situation people tend to purchase their home when they have done their budgets. I must emphasise that the approach that has been followed by this Government does not hold any appeal for me.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .