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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Wednesday, 30 June 2004) . . Page.. 3025 ..

advocates. If a government wishes to place any restriction on business, any taxation on business or bring about any improvement in working conditions, business is not likely to like that. That is born of self-interest, if nothing else.

It might be possible for those of us in the place that can consider more than one concept at a given time to embrace a position in which this government is unashamedly prepared to bring into legislation conditions that improve the health and safety of workers. That does not preclude us in any way from helping business to grow and the economy to strengthen. We had a whole debate in the last week or two about business migrating to New South Wales because of union access. The fact is that that provision already applies in New South Wales, but we had a whole railing against that particular provision. Of course we had that.

As I said, business has articulate advocates. With ready access to the media, why wouldn’t they try to minimise the impact of any restriction on what they do? But when it comes to the statistical stuff and it is not a case of opinion and it is not a case of maybe realising when you are being surveyed that what you say will have an impact within the public forum, but what you are actually doing when you are really out there doing your business, you find that we have record employment, that we have record job advertisements and that we observe the strongest intention to employ.

Those things are objective measures and they are far more objective than the qualitative surveys which ask, “Do you like government policy?” You can go out into the street and ask the people how many of them like government policy, but do not come in here and say that we have to let the particular opinion on that be the sole arbiter of decisions that we might take in here. That really would be reducing the position to a nonsense. As I said, I thank Mr Smyth for bringing that topic into the discussion.

This government has worked with business in the ACT and business in the ACT has happily worked with this government. It will still go out and criticise and it will still campaign. At least we have reached the stage in our relationship with the major business representation body, the business council, that it will ring us up first and say, “Sorry, but we are going to have to go out and give you a smack on this one as we don’t like it.” That would be fair enough if we did not expect them to like it, but we would have hoped that they would have done enough homework to realise that you cannot talk about businesses marching off to New South Wales. They have to march as far as Queensland to avoid union access and if they do they might find that they will only have temporary respite anyway.

This government has committed to and produced an economic white paper and it does have a plan for the territory. (Extension of time granted.) I know that the anal retentives amongst us would like to have more targets and that those that live by the slogan of keeping the bastards honest and not much else really do need all those figures and depend on those figures for their lifeblood, otherwise, as I said earlier in the piece, they might just have to make some positive contributions and suggestions.

We are open today to suggestions on how to grow business of any sort in the ACT, to strengthen the economy, to make that economy capable of absorbing those people who are not employed, who are underemployed or unskilled or are in the grey zone, as some of us are. We would be very happy to receive those suggestions in a positive way. I give

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