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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (7 December) . . Page.. 3931 ..

MS CARNELL (continuing):

upgrading many of our suburban shopping centres with a program called helpShop and with, of course, our precinct management. Well, guess what has happened, Mr Speaker? The turnover at those local suburban shops has actually increased. According to the last figures I saw, it has increased by something like 15 per cent at a time when local shops are still dying around the country. That is pretty good.

Mr Speaker, we now have a wine industry that we can be proud of. BRL Hardy has opened in Northbourne Avenue and is planting a significant number of hectares of vines around Canberra, the ACT and the region. This is a major industry. It is an industry that is growing very quickly and a wide range of people apart from Hardy is getting into the industry. The good news about the wine industry, of course, is that it is a major employer. It is employing people with different skills to those used in the IT industry but it is an industry that is growing and is providing real jobs.

In the arts area, we built the Playhouse, something that had been promised when the casino premium was first put on the table. The Tuggeranong Arts Centre was opened. CMAG, the Canberra Museum and Gallery, was finally refurbished and opened. The arts community can be very pleased that those projects finally got off the drawing board - or, I suppose, off the promise sheet - and became a reality. I certainly hope that in the next few years we see the precinct finished with the link upgraded as well. This is something that I would like to put on the table as a challenge. The Canberra National Multicultural Festival has gone from strength to strength to be one of the major multicultural festivals in the country.

Mr Speaker, you could go on with all the things that have been achieved. Our unemployment rate now at 4.4 per cent is the lowest in the country. Our growth rate is the highest in the country. We have the fastest growing IT industry and the fastest growing retail industry. Our tourism industry is doing better than the industry in any other part of Australia - not second best, but the best.

Those opposite regularly say, "Oh yes, but it is nothing to do with you. It is to do with the economy generally." The reality is that that is not the case. We are doing miles better than New South Wales or Victoria in all of these areas. If it was a matter of what was happening to the national economy then we would just be tracking along with New South Wales or Victoria. That is not happening.

In fact, the fall in our unemployment rate has been significantly greater than the fall in the national unemployment rate. So it is not a case of us just doing the same as everybody else - the federal government, the New South Wales government or the Olympics. The fact is, the ACT is doing better.

The question then, Mr Speaker, is: why? It is because we have a great city. It is a wonderful place in which to live. We have a well - educated workforce. We a have a range of opportunities and, I suppose, benefits here that simply do not exist in some of the bigger cities. But we have got to maintain them, and I will speak more about that in just a moment.

Mr Speaker, there are things that I am disappointed we did not do. Of course, for me a couple of the very important ones lie in the area of drug law reform. I believe very strongly that if we had got the heroin trial up we would have saved lots of lives by now.

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