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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Wednesday, 25 August 2004) . . Page.. 4154 ..

What we get is an answer from the minister and, even on the best estimates of the experts, it will take six months to see any effect and will probably deliver, at worst, five beds and, at best, 10 beds. Let’s face it, you are talking about an extra five beds. Those five extra beds will simply cover the population growth probably in the next six months and the next year. So there is no gain, long term, for the suffering public of Canberra who want to know that their hospital system is there to look after them and is capable of looking after them when they arrive.

Let’s move to business and tourism. Business confidence is down over the last two quarters. Oddly enough, or perhaps it is because of it, it is the two quarters since Mr Quinlan launched his much-vaunted economic white paper. We understand that there are a number of drafts of the white paper, the first of which was apparently good. Apparently the first was a corker. But Mr Quinlan could not get it through cabinet, and the departmental official resigned and went to Victoria instead.

We see businesses closing. We have got the ABS stats. Mr Quinlan had some fun with the ABS stats, saying, “Look, they’ve been discontinued and much of it is qualified.” Yes, much of it is qualified. But I never quoted from the qualified lines in the survey, Mr Speaker. The final line, unqualified, shows that in June 2001 there were 18,500 businesses in the ACT; in June 2003, it is down to 16,100—2,400 businesses, unqualified, have gone missing under the care of the Treasurer.

We then see almost $1million wasted on the economic white paper. Why? Because the Treasurer himself said, “It’s a statement of the bleeding obvious.” And he is right. These are things that people know. We hear the Treasurer say, “I’m the first one to put down a strategic plan.” He should refer back to the 1996 strategic plan for the ACT, which had targets and timetables and was put together quite quickly upon the first Carnell government coming to office.

Then, of course, we have the Convention Centre debacle. Three years after coming to office, nothing has happened. I am told the Treasurer has gone to Singapore to talk to officials. I am told that the officials actually came here on a number of occasions and could not get in to see the Treasurer. Here we are spending taxpayers’ money on sending the Treasurer to Singapore to talk to the owners of the hotel and, when the owners of the hotel came to Canberra, he was too busy to see them.

Also in regard to business: we then have the things that are really getting up the nose of business. The first is the right of unions to enter, brought in because the unions wanted it. No case was made; there are no figures to indicate that it will work and no plan inside WorkCover to increase their resources to cope with the supposed extra work that is going to appear. We have the industrial manslaughter legislation, an attack on business. We have the principle of portability of long-service leave and sick leave. Apparently they will now be done after the election, if the government is successful, because they are too afraid to bring them on now.

Of course, we have the failure to raise the payroll tax threshold from a Chief Minister and his government who, when in opposition, said they wanted to be a low-taxing regime. That is a joke as well, because, if we go to the taxes that this government tried to put in, we find the ill-fated bushfire tax—that proposal was defeated by the Assembly;

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