Page 3768 - Week 12 - Thursday, 22 November 2007
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Mr Stanhope notes in paragraph (2) of his motion the consequent benefits that he says will flow to us in critical policy and administrative areas such as commonwealth-state relations, health, education and several other things. That worries me a bit. Does Mr Stanhope actually see Mr Rudd as some great white knight that is going to come in here and help Mr Stanhope with some of the things that have gone wrong in the territory? Is it his fervent hope that Mr Rudd is some great white knight that will come in and save his stressed education system, health system and transport system, will save his failed economic management and will save his failed territory-commonwealth relations?
It is interesting that Mr Stanhope mentions that it will benefit the ACT in the critical area of commonwealth-state relations, because Mr Stanhope has had a fair bit to do himself in making sure that those are not as good as they should be. Let us have a look at that point, because I think that is clearly at the centre of Mr Stanhope’s motion. Indeed, I think the Stanhope government itself has considered itself as some sort of white knight off on a crusade to slay the dreadful fire-breathing dragon that it sees as the federal government, all in some self-contrived belief that the people of Canberra needed to be protected from that dragon.
The reality is that the current Stanhope government here, quite contrary to protecting the people, wanted to somehow muddy the waters of the commonwealth’s contribution to the ACT, its people and its economy. Indeed, it wanted to make the commonwealth look as bad as it could so as to make itself look somehow noble. It was a case of refusing to cooperate for the sake of refusing to cooperate or, even worse, perhaps a self-centred party political reason for not cooperating with the other states and with the commonwealth as it should.
Some examples spring to mind. To start with, there was the stunt that Mr Stanhope pulled when he published the commonwealth’s draft anti-terrorist legislation. No other state or territory did that. And why would he want to put at risk the safety and the security of the people of Canberra, not to mention the people of Australia, by doing that? And that action certainly did that. What government would also put up legislation, in this case the same-sex marriage legislation, knowing it would be rejected and overturned by the commonwealth? Clearly, that would seem to be a callous intent to raise the ire of the commonwealth in an effort to, again, paint it as the bully.
Then, of course, we had this government’s constant refusal to acknowledge the contribution the commonwealth makes to the ACT economy. The truth of the matter is that the Howard Liberal government in its past 11 years in office has made a very significant contribution to the ACT, to its people and to its economy. It has provided public sector employment—I mentioned the figure yesterday of some 52,000 federal public servants employed in the ACT—and it has made significant investments in infrastructure and national buildings. It has also supported sport and the arts, and its Work Choices initiatives have yielded higher productivity and the lowest unemployment figures in more than 33 years. In fact, you have got to go back 33 years to see similar unemployment figures. The Prime Minister has a target of three per cent unemployment right across the country. I note Mr Rudd is not particularly talking about targets for unemployment.
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