Page 1933 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 May 2009
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We then get to the notion of government spending. What we have had is seven years of wasteful spending from this government—wasteful expenditure. We took to the last election a program of savings, some $200 million. They were not particularly savage; there was not particularly anything major in it. It was looking at the inefficient delivery of services or unnecessary services—for instance, the spending from the LDA on advertising. You had a monopoly landholder who felt they had to advertise—enormous amounts of money spent advertising a monopoly. That is inefficient; that is wasteful. And it goes to the other extreme. We go down to a few tens of thousands of dollars spent on the Grassby statue. These are decisions that are not based in fact; they are not based in reality.
We have got the failure to deliver the GDE on time, on budget. It was meant to be a four-lane road; it is a two-lane road. The original estimate back in 2000 was $55 million. Who knows where it will end up? It will end up being close to a quarter of a billion dollars. Some $120 million is already spent; there is another $82 million to come. But it is the time, the delay, the efficiency, the effect on the community and the effect on the standing of the government.
If you look at their delivery of capital works, it has been appalling. Whether it be the GDE or the prison that was opened in August last year and that is still encountering problems today as we speak, the government’s delivery of capital works and the way that it wastes money are an indication of a government that is not in control, an indication of a government that does not know where it wants to take the economy.
Let us look at things like spending on travel, the government’s own spending and spending by government organisations like Actew—spending money unnecessarily, not on community service or information but just on advertising what the government has been up to. If we look at all these instances along with many others, it is indicative of a government that has its priorities wrong.
They failed to control wasteful spending. At the same time—having cut tourism, having cut business—they have no concrete plan to diversify the economic base of the ACT and they have made no effort to diversify the economic base of the ACT. At a time when your revenue comes from two streams—own-source revenue and revenue from the federal government—you need a third line; normally that is business.
We have taxes on business. We have high property taxes on business. We know their tax policy: squeeze them till they bleed but not until they die. We have silly and complex taxes like the utilities tax. And we have a litany of failed tax attempts; there are almost a dozen of them now. Mr Quinlan through Mr Stanhope and Ms Gallagher through Mr Stanhope have been bringing forward silly proposals since they got to govern—most of which, thankfully, have been stopped by the Assembly, stopped by the Canberra Liberals, because they are an impediment to growing the economy. What we need, and what we do not get from this government, is a plan to diversify the economic base.
Mr Quinlan, to give him his due, had an economic white paper. He himself called it a statement of the bleeding obvious. Mr Stanhope, as the economic development
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