Page 1247 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 9 April 2008
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Mr Speaker, this motion goes to the heart of much that we have been debating for some time in the Assembly. Particularly after two days of equivocation from the Chief Minister and Treasurer, it is important to note that the 2008-09 federal budget will have a significant adverse impact on the ACT economy and, through that, on individual Canberrans.
When you look at the document that is guiding the economic development of the ACT, the much-vaunted economic white paper, it is interesting to note that on page 26 it talks about a narrow economic structure and revenue base for the ACT. As the then Treasurer Ted Quinlan said, “Yes, it is a statement of the bleeding obvious.” It is interesting that four years later we have a Chief Minister and Minister for Business and Economic Development and Treasurer who still constantly laments the narrow economic base. The fact that four years after this document was produced the base is no broader is an indictment of the failure of the Stanhope government to take any action to diversify the economic base. The Chief Minister can say that they have done it but the sad reality is that it has not occurred.
In many ways the Rudd cuts are unnecessary given the zero debt that the federal government has and the $17 billion surplus it has inherited, and it is unnecessary for the people of Canberra to be victimised. The sad thing about it is the failure of the Stanhope Labor government and the ministers and the backbenchers of that government to in any way raise the prospect with their colleagues that this is not a good thing for the ACT. The failure of the Stanhope government in this regard will be well and truly measured in the results in October this year.
We have a Chief Minister who promised to lead a low-taxing government when he was in office. What has he done about it? During the last debate I read the litany of all the initiatives that they tried on but which the Assembly had the good sense to reject or which fell apart under scrutiny: the new rating policy, the transfer of business assets, the bushfire tax, the loan security tax, the pay parking in Barton, the parking space tax, the motor vehicle tax, and so it goes on. This is the regime that the Chief Minister felt was a low-taxing regime.
The reality is that he has not developed or demonstrated any capacity to implement a coherent taxation strategy and a coherent business strategy. We have a Chief Minister who managed the development of the Canberra plan and the economic white paper within that overall plan but who has since virtually repudiated all that was set out in the white paper, including relegating some of the proposed recommendations to second order, presumably because they are less important. We have the conflict even in the answers that the Chief Minister gives in regard to what is a second order initiative. In one answer to questions on notice he said that, for instance, the recommendation in regard to the development of intellectual property in the ACT—action 40—is a second order initiative. When I asked him to explain that, he said that there are no second orders. So one of the answers he has given to this Assembly and had published in the Hansard is absolutely incorrect.
Then we have the Chief Minister and his former Treasurer claiming as an objective through the economic white paper the intention of making the ACT the most
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