Page 3504 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 21 September 2005
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ACT the IT capital of Australia. That was a consequence of the work of the previous government. We had double the national average of people involved in IT. Why? Because of the work of the previous government.
He then went on to talk about biotech. If I remember back to 1999, the federal government put up about $10 million worth of biotech investment money. We, the then ACT government, together with the ANU, the CSIRO and a number of other partners, put together a consortium that picked up about 60 per cent of that money. They formed a little thing called Epicorp that was commercialising biotech industry in the ACT long before you found it, Treasurer. It was actually here in the ACT because we talked to the federal government; we put together the bid; we got the money; and we started the industry. I think you need to go back and get your facts straight, because rewriting history can come back to bite you.
What Mr Mulcahy is trying to get at here—and he made a good point—was that you cannot afford to sit tight. What we saw reflected in the motion this morning was: things are okay, so do not change anything; if we sit tight, the wolves will wander past the door; they will not come in. But you cannot afford to sit tight. You cannot afford to run the Chicken Little school of politics that says, “The sky will fall.” Look at the achievement of any federal government in relation to growth—growth in wages, growth in income for households, growth in employment and growth in real wages. The current federal government has overdelivered on each of those. It has also overdelivered, in comparison to the previous Labor government, on what has been done for Canberra.
Let us look at the last budget. The last budget put $54 million into a national portrait gallery—vital infrastructure for the future. Mr Mulcahy talks about us having superior infrastructure. It has put $40 million into the refurb of the mint; it is going to build a new public service building at Russell; it is going to build a federation guard headquarters at Duntroon, and so on. Here is the commitment of the federal Liberal government to Canberra, but we do not see that view from this government. This government has missed the opportunity. Even the Canberra Times, in an editorial, said that some of these budgets were budgets of lost opportunity.
The ABS has recently put out some predictions. Their low prediction says that, by 2030, the ACT population will actually have gone backwards. If you take a medium route it says that, by about 2030, the population of the ACT will be up to about 380,000. If you want to take the high forecast it will be up to about 452,000. That is not going to happen unless we have a plan to make it happen and, as Mr Mulcahy points out so well in (2) (b), unless we create specific advances in superior infrastructure and maintain that infrastructure for a clean and plentiful water supply. That will become the limiting sum on all growth in Australia. We must look at things like personal safety, which is something that has been ignored by this government.
Point (c) says that we should improve relationships with the federal government to develop special features and facilities that reflect the nation’s capital. The national government—the federal government, the commonwealth government—is doing its bit: what is this lot doing? They sit here day after day bagging all the initiatives of a government that has overdelivered for the last nine years. I think it shows that we are still fighting the ideological cold war that these people enjoy so much when they have nothing else to say. We need to look at the numbers. Let us take the ABS middle
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