Page 2889 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 16 October 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
According to the Housing Industry Association, affordable housing in Canberra has hit its lowest level since 1984, but, of course, that has nothing to do with the Stanhope government. It just keeps bumping up taxes, apparently in the fond belief that they keep being passed on into infinity without actually impacting on anyone. The Property Council estimates an average block of land attracts around $150,000 in state or territory taxes. That figure is from the Boulevard of Broken Dreams report of January 2007. Then, as the opposition has pointed out repeatedly, there is the problem of slow land release. As one builder put it to the opposition, what we have is not a housing affordability crisis but a land affordability crisis. The costs of building have remained quite low while the cost of land has jumped by 300 per cent in a matter of a few years.
Mr Speaker, I turn now to one matter in relation to education. As I said earlier, we closed 23 schools. Only over the weekend the government was putting demountables at Fraser and at Aranda and at, I think, one other school. This is at a time when they closed Hall and Flynn, which are pretty close to Fraser. They also aim to close Cook at the end of the year. Why on earth would you close those schools when you are putting in demountables at Aranda and at Fraser? It just shows what an incompetent decision that was.
Also, when we are talking about financial incompetence and stupid extravagances and their impact on ordinary people, I would refer people to the recent report of the Essential Services Consumer Council, which assists Canberrans facing gas, water, or electricity disconnection. The council has experienced a doubling of the numbers of people who sought assistance in 2001, the year the government came to office. In the last financial year, it received 1,200 new applications for assistance. Of course, we have the utilities tax introduced by the government last year, netting about $16 million. It will add another $130 on average to a Canberra household’s bill. Last year’s budget saw an increase in taxes and charges of $256 on average, including the water abstraction charge.
This year, residents will pay an extra $145 on top of this, making an extra $400 or thereabouts at least for the average household. That is why my colleague, Mr Mulcahy, will later on today be introducing a bill to repeal that insidious tax, which no-one else has in this Commonwealth of Australia. The government’s inability to manage the ACT finances and its extravagance on vanity items like a human rights prison are impacting badly on those who can least afford it. The government’s promise is “More work to do”. If that is supposed to instil confidence, it does not, because more of the same means more incompetence.
Of course, we come to health, and I think it is in this area that we just see how incompetent this government, with its raft of ever-changing health ministers, has become. For months we have been telling the public about the lack of things like basic equipment and supplies available to our hard-worked nurses at Canberra’s public hospitals. We have heard about the lack of lifting equipment, bandaging and basic drugs, and about patients having their treatment finished early owing to the lack of supplies. We have heard things such as Peter Colignon last week revealing—and he should know—that about 30 patient rooms had been converted to administrators offices. In July this year, the Australian Nursing Federation’s ACT branch also
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .