Page 1251 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 25 March 2009
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some responsibility for not having the wherewithal—when we had an economic boom that lasted for almost a decade and delivered $1.6 billion more revenue than expected—for not taking the opportunity to diversify the employment base and build this city a future.
It is the failure to diversify that is perhaps the most deadly and the most sad thing that this government have done to the ACT. The bad decisions that they made have squandered the opportunity that will not come along again, I suspect, for a very long time.
We have squandered a boom—an endless boom. I am sure they thought it was never going to end. Let me go back to previous programs such as No Waste by 2010. We were told that No Waste by 2010 offers an opportunity to develop industries based on sustainable economies. The greenhouse strategy that I put out in 2000 said there were opportunities here to develop industry based on a sustainable economy. But what we have had for seven years is a walking away from any attempt to diversify the economic base.
The bad decisions include their follies and their waste, Mr Speaker: $5 million on a busway that, in the words of John Hargreaves, will never be built while he is alive. Why plan for something you have no intention of building? Why plan and now have that plan languish for so many years that it will need to be updated—if you intended ever to go ahead with it—to such a degree, with further public consultation undertaken, that your original planning is now superfluous? It is absolutely superfluous. An amount of $5 million was spent.
At the large, that is a perfect example of the folly of this government. In the middle we have the government as the sole seller of land in this city. Yet the LDA had millions of dollars in advertising budgets and spent $300,000 on a site office; $300,000! There in the median you have the folly and the waste of squandered millions of dollars. At the small level, it is things like $40,000 for happy camps; it is stationery budgets; it is about controlling the pennies to look after the pounds.
There is also a question: why are we here? Why do we have the government at all when the Treasurer actually says, “We are too small to stimulate”? Well, if you are too small to stimulate, you do not have the wherewithal or you are that clueless that you cannot, get out of the way. I will quote Mr Barr: “Get out of the way.” Your job is to create confidence. We had the lecture from the Treasurer yesterday about the opposition talking down the government. Yet it is the Treasurer who goes out and says that it is all guesswork. She says, “We are too small to stimulate.” She starts by getting people excited by saying we will have a mini-budget that will stimulate early in the new year. We see it downgraded and downgraded and downgraded and her now saying, “We have a local initiatives package”.
Why are we here? If we are not responsible, if we are too small to stimulate, if we do not want you to get hopes up and if it is all guesswork, why are we here? I refuse to accept any of that, because I know that previous governments have done it. You can have an impact, and the Treasurer and the Chief Minister have an obligation to make sure that it works.
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