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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (29 March) . . Page.. 1037 ..
MS CARNELL (continuing):
significant, not just in jobs, but in the financial return to the ACT taxpayer over the medium to long term. These figures show that, if we got that many new jobs into the system, the return to the ACT down the track in a number of different ways, not the least being payroll tax, would be significant. In fact, we would end up getting to a return on this deal inside 10 years, which is quite quick for these sorts of business incentive arrangements.
Mr Moore: That is the return to government.
MS CARNELL: As Mr Moore says, that is the return to government. It does not take into account the return to the community more broadly. If Ms Tucker has a look at the Access Economics report she will see that it runs through that at length. Mr Speaker, although I do have a copy of it with me, it would take me more than four minutes to run through it and show how significant dollars would flow back to both government and the community more generally. I would suggest that an investment of $8m to achieve the sorts of ends that we are talking about here is a very good investment. I would like to have more of those sorts of investments.
MS TUCKER: That was not an answer to my question. Maybe it was; maybe it was no. Mr Osborne thinks that it was no. I have a supplementary question. Instead of offering a business incentive of this amount of money, why did you not consider just making it a loan?
MS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, it is a capital injection loan which will be forgiven to Impulse when they reach the targets that will be in the final contract and that we have alluded to in the memorandum of understanding. If they do not actually achieve the ends, the loan will not be forgiven; that is the way the whole approach has been put together. If they achieve the ends, ends that produce very real benefit to the Canberra community in jobs, regional hubs, tourism and so on, the capital injection loan will be forgiven, which seems to me to be an absolute win for the people of Canberra.
MR HIRD: My question is to the Treasurer, Mr Humphries. Has the Treasurer kept count of the number of gaffes made by the Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the last few days on budget matters? Did Mr Quinlan get his budget responses wrong in the media releases of yesterday and earlier in the budget processes?
Mr Moore: A pertinent question.
MR HUMPHRIES
: It was a good question, but it is a bit hard to know where to begin on this process. A large number of claims have been made in the last three months or so about the Government's draft budget, but the extraordinary thing is how many inaccurate statements have been made by the shadow Treasurer and how extremely serious the errors that he has made in that process have been. Let us take a few of them. Mr Quinlan said in his blundered attempt to discredit the Government's balanced budget that even the new money from the Commonwealth will not put us truly in the black.
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