Page 1407 - Week 04 - Thursday, 26 March 2009
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That is holding things back. That has seen tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of dollars of potential investment in the economy being delayed—and, at a time when we know that finance has become more difficult to get, these delays can be fatal.
In previous times, when finance was much freer, we knew that these delays cost money and added to the costs of building, but they would be less likely to result in projects falling over, whereas we know now, and we have heard from industry, that sometimes some of these projects are on the verge of falling over because the banks and financial institutions withdraw their support if they cannot get the approval in a timely way. That is where this government continue to fail and continue not to respond in the way that they should to ensure that we see these kinds of investment go ahead.
Part of it is an attitudinal thing. Part of it is simply an attitude from this government that there are certain types of developments, namely those that are funded by the public sector, that are good developments and there are certain developments that are bad developments, whereas all of them should be assessed on their merits. But we should not see the unreasonable delays that we are seeing at the moment.
We saw works proposed under the third appropriation bill that had been assessed against six criteria, should not provide any additional burden to the government’s operating budget, would provide some measure of job support to local industry, would extend the useful life or approved life of the territory’s asset base, utilise potential emerging capacity in the building and construction sector, are at a mature stage of design and/or procurement to enable them to begin as soon as possible, and once commenced be undertaken and completed on time and on budget. All of these criteria apply to developments that are being held back by ACTPLA.
There are some particularly good initiatives in this package that I just want to briefly highlight. The expansion of the oncology clinics and cancer services facilities will help ACT residents, and we welcome that. Upgrades to Emergency Services Agency sheds and stations are an important initiative to ensure the safety of buildings, and the removal of asbestos from schools is incredibly important.
However, in summary, whilst we certainly support this, I think this is a fairly minor response. I think it has been acknowledged as such. It is a minor response; it is a tiny part of what needs to be done at a government level. We need to see the facilitation of investment. We need to see the encouragement of business. We need to see sensible spending and sensible targeting. Importantly, as picked up by the committee, we need to see a government that actually does the analysis when it spends money. Whether it is $12 million, whether it is $5 million, whether it is $100 million, when it spends money, particularly money that is designed to stimulate the economy, it needs to do the work, it needs to do the analysis, so that it knows that where it is targeting it it is getting maximum bang for taxpayers’ dollars. That clearly has not happened here. That said, it is better than nothing. It is a minor package which was meant to be a stimulus package. It is clearly not a stimulus package; it is not referred to as such any more. But we will be supporting it to the extent that it will make some difference to the sectors where it has been targeted.
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