Page 1264 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 25 March 2009
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year for some retailers. Indeed, I spoke to one retailer at Fyshwick three Saturdays ago—we met at a dinner—who said he did not make a single sale that day. Saturday is normally his biggest day but he did not make a single sale. He said 2008 was bad but 2009 will be tougher, and he has got shops all over the ACT. So these are the things that we are seeing.
The Chief Minister again quotes the employment statistics. Employment, Chief Minister, is a lagging indicator. The last thing any business does is fire its staff. The last thing any business does is waste the investment it has made of putting together its team to deliver its product and make the business work and generate a profit. The last thing you do is get rid of staff. You cut back on travel. You cut back on everything else that you can.
On 15 March last year—March, April, May, June, July, August—before the Chief Minister said he was going to have surpluses for four years, Peter Martin, an economics writer in the Canberra Times, explained this in a couple of paragraphs out of a story he wrote headed “The day we heard the economy snap”. The GFC is not something that just turned up. It did not happen after the election. The election was conducted in a climate of the world sliding and we had a Chief Minister who said, “I guarantee, I pledge that Labor’s fully funded election promises would maintain a forecast budget surplus for each year.” This is the point we make in this motion: we have a Chief Minister in denial. Peter Martin wrote:
Job offers react to spending and investment with a lag—
That is why they are called a lagging indicator, Chief Minister.
six months is one estimate. They tell you where you’ve been, not what lies ahead.
And those who quote employment are putting up a false premise. The article went on:
It’s a lesson the Macquarie Bank’s Rory Robertson says he learned painfully when he worked for the research department of the Reserve Bank at the time when the economy snapped in the late 1980s.
He says once a month at the Reserve Bank’s headquarters in Martin Place Sydney a gaggle of economists (often including the present Governor Glenn Stevens) would huddle around the single news-screen to read the employment numbers, often marvelling at the ongoing strength of full-time employment and still-sliding unemployment.
‘Later, it turned out that the economy actually was heading south, not waiting for the jobs data to catch up,’ he said this week.
That is the problem: if you are going to quote lagging indicators, you are deluding yourself and you are fooling the people of the ACT. What we are saying is that it is time the government outlined what it is they are going to do. In paragraph 4, we find out what the government have done. They have had a series of global financial crisis roundtables. And in response to the first set of roundtables what are we going to have? More roundtables. Paragraph 4 of the amendment says:
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