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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (2 December) . . Page.. 4253 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

If Mrs Carnell wants to achieve an even greater level of cooperation between the ACT and New South Wales governments, then she is going to need to find a more effective way of dealing with colleagues from the States than the kind of political point-scoring that was involved in that exercise. Her prime objective seemed to be to big-note herself to regional mayors, rather than achieving an outcome which would benefit the region. As Mrs Carnell herself indicated, she was able to arrange cooperation when political point-scoring was less important to her. What we are saying is that we ought to be aspiring to achieving more cooperation. Mrs Carnell has the capacity to do that if she puts her mind to it, I am sure. Certainly, a future Labor government in this Territory would put more effort into cooperating with the New South Wales Government - Labor, as it will be for some time, or Liberal at some time in the future.

I want to emphasise a couple of other matters. Some clear examples are highlighted in the report of how the business incentive scheme has successfully assisted a business to establish and to grow. Some of those businesses made suggestions about how they could have received other kinds of assistance which would have enabled them to grow even faster. We have referred to those in our recommendations. Other recipients indicated dealings with the department which inhibited their ability to establish and grow, and we have highlighted those. In doing so, I think we have provided a balanced report. The fact is that the Government will not move towards providing a better standard of industry assistance in this Territory if they close their eyes to all the deficiencies that have come up in relation to the operation of the business incentive scheme, if they do not learn from their mistakes and try to do better next time.

I think the report finds ways of doing better. As I said before, I commend the report to the Government, albeit notwithstanding their reluctance, in order to ensure that in the future we can provide a better standard of assistance to industry than we have in the past. This is an important area. Jobs growth for the Territory is an important issue and the effective use of industry assistance is important. But we will get that effectiveness only if we place an emphasis on reviewing what has gone before, on learning from our positive and negative experiences, and on finding ways to improve things, not by secreting all the details of these arrangements behind an impenetrable wall of commercial-in-confidence, ignoring the prerogatives of the Assembly to scrutinise government, and trying to sweep under the carpet all the problems that we have experienced. This is too important an issue for that approach to be taken. Mr Speaker, I urge the Government, in spite of their reluctance to learn from their mistakes, to consider some of the recommendations of the report, because I believe those recommendations provide a path for further development in the future and further improvement in the future.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

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