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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (2 December) . . Page.. 4252 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

I must admit that I was really disappointed, because I would have liked the people in our region to have the same benefits as people in the ACT have had. Mr Speaker, I believe that we should work more closely with New South Wales. We are working very closely with the region. But, again, Mr Carr would need to have a slightly different approach to people in the region. Maybe next budget he will look at it again. The other sorts of issues on which we have had, I suppose, less than positive approaches from New South Wales - initially, anyway - have been in such areas as sharing both the environment money and the Telstra money. In the end, with lobbying from all sorts of people, we have managed to pool the dollars for the whole of our region. I think that has been a great initiative.

Generally, Mr Speaker, I think that what those opposite need to do is to have a look at how well this system has worked. I am sure the reason that it has ended up being a pretty political document is that it is very hard for them to accept that anything that this Government has done has been a success. This has been an enormous success. I think up to 32 business packages have been put in place, worth very close to $60m in new investment and over 2,000 jobs. That would strike me as being something that is desperately needed in the ACT right now, and it is very unfortunate that those opposite obviously are not supportive of this sort of approach.

Mrs Littlewood: Because it is positive. You cannot be positive. You have to be negative.

MR WHITECROSS (11.58), in reply: I cannot believe Mrs Littlewood would ever criticise anyone for being negative, Mr Speaker. I want to deal with a couple of matters in reply. The first is that all members of the committee, even Mrs Littlewood on this occasion, accepted the importance of industry assistance as part of an overall plan for business growth in the Territory. A number of the recommendations go to issues which we in the committee - perhaps, not including Mrs Littlewood - believe would improve the business incentive scheme. In fact, Mrs Littlewood managed to dissent from only three of the nine recommendations; so, presumably, she endorses the others.

Mrs Littlewood, in her comments in this debate, said that the department had provided its submissions to the committee on time. Mr Speaker, the department provided its submissions to the committee the day before the committee hearings - not on time, but the day before the hearings. In fact, one of its submissions arrived so late that Mrs Littlewood could not even find it to bring to the hearing. It arrived so late that she did not even know it had arrived at all. She has the gall now to get up in this place and say that they all arrived on time. Clearly, it arrived too late for Mrs Littlewood to read the submission, because it had arrived so late that she did not even know it had arrived at all.

In relation to cooperation with New South Wales, Mrs Carnell clearly contradicted herself. Having given some examples of how the New South Wales and ACT governments can cooperate, she still managed to conclude that we could not cooperate because the New South Wales Government did not sign on to her Youth500 initiative. Cooperation does not consist of Mrs Carnell writing a letter to Bob Carr and then putting out a press release criticising him when he does not agree to do whatever she wants. That is not regional cooperation.

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