Page 448 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 4 March 2008
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The curious thing is that it was going to be bigger and better; it was going to be held over nine days. It was going to coincide with the torch relay. Everything was going to be wonderful. Yet here we are, two weeks after that announcement, and the minister’s plan is in absolute tatters. Balloon Aloft are now not getting $70,000; they are getting $10,000. Instead of running the event, it is now being run out of the offices of the Chief Minister’s Department and Territory and Municipal Services. How that is value for taxpayers’ money, and how that plan goes so swiftly to pieces in just two weeks, is beyond me. Obviously, they did not plan. It would be great if the minister would come back and table the business plan that they based this decision on, as well as the legal advice. They have promised to provide some of this to a committee, but they should table it here and tell us about the processes they went through, because their plan is in tatters. It is like what has happened with so many plans, Mr Deputy Speaker, as you would know—the plan to build a concrete memorial bridge to John Hargreaves and the plan to set up FireLink that went so bad.
You have to consider the comments of the then Leader of the Opposition, in his code of good governance speech in March 2001, when he said—and this was Mr Stanhope speaking:
Labor will ensure that there is, within the ACT Government service, a renewed capacity for policy and planning, so that the days of top-of-the-head or back-of-the-envelope decision-making are gone.
I think the top-of-the-head and back-of-the-envelope decision making are well and truly alive in the Stanhope government as they stumble from disaster to disaster. Just look at the evidence. Recall the Canberra plan, with its three key components—the spatial plan, the social plan and the economic white paper. Let us look at the white paper. It cost at least $2 million to produce a discussion paper and the final document. After two years, it was released in December 2003. A key commitment in this paper was to make the ACT “the most small-business-friendly jurisdiction in Australia”. After five years or so, we are still waiting, and so is the business community.
While businesses in the ACT are hit with a raft of higher and newer taxes that impede them in being able to operate more efficiently and more profitably, at the same time we see the government abandoning its economic white paper. There were nine priority industries set out in chapter 5 that are no longer priorities. No longer is it a priority to have information and communication technologies, space sciences, biotechnology, public administration, environmental industries, creative industries, sport science and administration, education, and defence.
Mr Deputy Speaker, you will be surprised to know—or maybe you won’t—that many of the actions identified in the paper have been long since ignored. We know that the Chief Minister has relegated actions to being “second order actions”—second-class actions. That is Chief Minister-speak for “they will not happen”. Let us look at some of the tax proposals that they brought forward, particularly the proposals to do with changing the basis for determining rates for residential property. Now, there was a plan, and if I remember rightly, the then Treasurer said he drew it up on the back of an envelope. He had a discussion with a neighbour and he thought it was a good idea. Let us look at the introduction of taxing measures that were being abolished in other
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