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

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (2 December) . . Page.. 4246 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

Mr Speaker, the committee also recommended that the Government explore, in consultation with the Commonwealth and New South Wales governments, the possibility of developing a cooperative regional industry incentive program. This recommendation is indeed ambitious, but it recognises the importance of regional development and it recognises the importance of the ACT as part of the national capital region and the need for us to work together and go forward together if we are to achieve outcomes in the interests of the whole region.

I was surprised to find Mrs Littlewood dissenting from this recommendation and not agreeing with the concept of cooperation between people in order to further regional development, apparently because she does not trust the New South Wales Government. There is no doubt that intergovernmental cooperation is a difficult thing. It is a politically ambitious task to get governments to cooperate and to see common interests. But I do not think that the ambitious nature of this recommendation is a reason for rejecting this approach out of hand.

I was particularly taken with the extraordinary claim in Mrs Littlewood's dissenting report that the New South Wales Government had adopted a self-serving attitude to the question of assisting Bega Cheese. Here we have the ACT Government offering Bega Cheese an incentive package worth over $6m to relocate to Canberra from somewhere else in the national capital region and the New South Wales Government seeking to assist a business in Bega, which is in the State of New South Wales, and Mrs Littlewood's conclusion is that the New South Wales Government's action in assisting their own constituents in Bega is a self-serving attitude.

It is no wonder that Mrs Littlewood does not favour trying to cooperate with other jurisdictions if she starts off from the position of thinking that the action of another government in trying to look after the interests of their own constituents is a self-serving attitude on the part of that government. I would have thought that they were doing their job. I think it is important that we do try to build closer relations with the New South Wales and Commonwealth governments, to ensure that we do get an appropriate scheme whereby we can take the region forward as a unit. We are not going to get the kind of regional development that we all aspire to if we are competing with each other.

The other recommendations deal with some issues to do with the detail of the industry assistance package and the business incentive scheme, particularly issues to do with the timeliness of consideration of grants. There was criticism by some of the recipients over timeliness and how that impacted on their business. There was also criticism about business expertise and how the lack of business expertise on the part of some of the people considering applications impacted on the consideration of those applications.

Recommendation 8 deals with the question of land grants. One of the matters which concerned at least some members of the committee was the fact that on two occasions land grants had been given to applicants under the business incentive scheme even though the applicants lacked the capital actually to develop the land in question and to build anything on it. Both recipients in question were under the apparently mistaken impression that they could raise capital from these land grants; that they could borrow against the equity in this land, not realising that the conditions on the land grants made that impossible. It seems to be something of a failure of the scheme if people are given

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