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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (2 December) . . Page.. 4281 ..

MR KAINE: It may be that their briefing demonstrates that there is no particular advantage in doing so, in which case I would be foolish to give that sort of a commitment. I will wait until I have a proper briefing on the subject - on which I am not expert, and I do not claim to be - and then I will consider where to go from there.

Mr Moore: Mr Speaker, I think the supplementary question was misunderstood.

Ms Tucker: Yes. I would like to clarify that. I was asking about cars, the fleet of cars, not just buses.

Mr Moore: The ACT car fleet.

MR KAINE: I recollect that the question asked me to give some commitment. The answer is, Mr Speaker, that on the basis of the information that I currently have I could not give such a commitment, but I will seek information and I will act from an informed position.

Economy

MS REILLY: My question is to the Chief Minister. Chief Minister, I refer to your comments at the Property Council conference last Friday where you described the recession in Canberra as "the transition that we had to have", or, as you may have preferred to call it, the hiccup on the hill. Is that why Canberrans have been forced to watch the equity in their homes disappear as housing prices in the ACT plummet? Collectively, home owners in Canberra have lost over $1 billion in the value of residential property. Is this transition that we had to have the reason why the ACT has experienced the lowest building approvals since statistics were first collected?

MRS CARNELL: For the interest of all of those present, my extraordinarily efficient staff have produced a copy of the speech I made. Maybe it would be useful for me to quote the piece out of the speech that those opposite are using.

MR SPEAKER: Proceed.

Mr Berry: It was not in the speech. You said it when you were sitting beside me.

MR SPEAKER: I warn you, Mr Berry.

MRS CARNELL: After going through all of the sorts of approaches that we were taking, such things as unveiling an industry strategy in the near future, I think I said - well, I know I said - that we have to be enthusiastic. I then said:

We have to take the chip off our shoulder. We have to ignore the Canberra headlines and use them to our advantage. We will continue with reforms to streamline planning and approval processes, programs that encourage more innovative investment such as our Civic Revitalisation program and other initiatives.

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