Page 2025 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006

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emergency services, hospitals, education and police, but you have to make it to spend it. Lumbering ordinary taxpayers with more and more of a burden is not going to make us the attractive community that people might think that they would move to.

We are spending money in south-west Sydney on getting people to come and join us. The people of south-west Sydney would have read the Daily Telegraph this morning and would have read about “Stanhope-less, the economic vandal whose disgraced government has declared war on Canberra”. I suspect that anybody reading about that in Sydney today would be saying, “Gee, what is going on down there? They are spending money up here on getting us to go and live with them because they are really good and they are closing down a quarter of their schools, cutting tourism, cutting business and getting rid of all their statutory authorities. The vandal whose disgraced government has declared war on Canberra.”

What we have in this budget is an illogical approach to business. It is illogical because the cuts are short-sighted and, like all short-sighted cuts, they will have to be made up. When you start to play catch-up in these games, you have to spend more and more, instead of consistently getting expenditure at the right level. We have spent a couple of years on getting the Canberra brand—“see yourself in Canberra”—up in the public’s mind. I understand that the government has a report on that. I would love to see a copy of the report to see whether it is working. I might be able to get that somewhere else. We have a brand and we have been promoting it. We are now just going to turn the heat down. The pot will go off the boil.

The effect of that will be lost revenue to the government, so your ability to balance your books will disappear. You will lose the flow-on effect on young people in particular starting out. As it is an industry that employs an extraordinarily high percentage of women, you will disadvantage the women of the ACT. It will have a flow-on effect on the local providers of services who hang very much off the hospitality and tourism industries for their livelihoods and the government will lose revenue.

I do not see any wins in this change at all. There is no logic to it. It defies logic that we are taking these steps. To top it all off, we are actually going to destroy the ACTC. I suspect that we will be the only jurisdiction in this country which does not have an independent, board-run tourism body that is able to react. That is an indictment of the Stanhope government. If they think that that is the way forward, they are fooling themselves. They are injuring the image, the reputation and the opportunities of the people of the ACT, and ultimately they are hurting themselves.

Question put:

That Mr Stefaniak’s amendment agreed to.

The Assembly voted—

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