Page 3403 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 14 November 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
What we have here today is Jon Stanhope saying to the taxpayers, the voters in the ACT, “You’ve got money in your pocket and I want it.” He wants it because of all the reasons that Mr Pratt, in particular, has pointed out—the complete mismanagement and the wrong priorities of this government. We have seen for six years, time after time, that when there is criticism of government services—and there has been criticism of government services here today—the first recourse of the Stanhope government is to say, “You can’t criticise us. Look how much money we have put into it.” This is a government that measures its performance on the amount of money it puts in and not the outcomes it gets out of the system.
We, on the other side of the Assembly, do not believe that we should have our hands in the pockets of taxpayers, the voters, all the time taking away every small bit of change. We do not believe, like the Greens, that we should have a range of regressive and complicated taxes that actually batter about the single-income earner, the people on fixed incomes, the people on low incomes, the average working family—Mr Howard’s battlers or the people that Mr Rudd would like to reach out to and say are now his heartland.
What we are talking about here is, if we go down the path that the Chief Minister wants, people will have to abdicate their autonomy and have someone like the Chief Minister, someone like Mr Gentleman, someone like Dr Foskey, making decisions about where they should spend their money. Heaven help us that the people who earned the money should have the right to work out how to spend it for themselves! What we have seen here today—we see it again and again, with the words that come out of the government—is an overwhelming desire for increased services over tax cuts. I have heard the Chief Minister say it a number of times in the last few days. I heard Mr Gentleman say something similar this morning in relation to his draft exposure of the feed-in tariff bill.
Mr Speaker, there is research that shows that often, when people are asked these things—a top-of-mind issue—they answer, “Yes, I wouldn’t mind paying more taxes for better hospital services, better schooling or more renewable energy.” However, when you actually put them to the test, they do not want to pay the taxes, and this is exemplified, for instance, by the take-up of Greenchoice power. If people actually believed what Mr Gentleman and Mr Stanhope said they believed, we would see a better uptake of Greenchoice power. There is a cognitive dissidence between what people say and what they do.
Mr Pratt has exemplified a range of things where the government has got it wrong. The classic one, the one that really rankles in the community, is how wrong they got it over schools. You have been to the meetings, Mr Speaker; you know how angry people in the community are, how disillusioned traditional Labor supporters are with this government who, at the last election said, “We will not close schools.”
Mr Seselja: Who was the minister who said that?
MRS DUNNE: The then minister herself did not say it, Mr Seselja; it was her senior staff. That minister never again said what the senior staff member said. But Minister
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .