Page 2097 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 May 2009
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I will not seek refuge in avoidance, as Jon Stanhope did when he presented his budget reply in the first year of his new term as opposition leader. Over the coming months I will be announcing legislative action and policy initiatives which are designed to protect jobs and economic activity in the ACT and ensure that core services are able to be delivered to the people of the ACT in a sustainable and economically responsible manner.
That process has already started. We will not be waiting a year. We have moved quickly to pass laws to make the government more open and accountable. We have proposed a bill to stop this government wasting millions of taxpayers’ dollars on political advertising which has already received in-principle support from this Assembly.
In the coming months we will put before the Assembly a raft of measures, as I have already announced, including infrastructure Canberra, which is a comprehensive plan for better delivery of infrastructure in this town. We made the point last year that the government needed to make the changes, the structural changes, to better deliver infrastructure. Since then we have still seen no action and we see a $188 million underspend again this year. We will also be putting forward policies for further streamlining of the planning system and we will continue to put forward sensible savings.
In response to Katy Gallagher’s desperate plea yesterday for assistance in finding savings, I would be very happy to provide a briefing to the Treasurer on the simple, comprehensive plan for our savings, many of which have already been costed by Treasury.
We will be engaging with the community and initiating public debate over the critical areas of health and education. No doubt, as we saw last year, every move we make will be derided by this government. However, the playing field has changed and they are not the majority strength that they once were.
Our vision is for a territory that is planned better, built better and run better; a territory planned around the imperatives of the next century, not the headlines of next week; a territory run on simple, sound principles that, if you are the recipients of boom revenues from the community, those revenues should be reinvested in the community; that the taxpayers’ money should be expended for their benefit, not hoarded for the benefit of the sitting government. And it is incumbent on governments to provide for the community, not for the community to fund the incumbent government. We have a long record of putting our alternatives to the people, which we can now see will provide more robust responses to the current crisis than the myopic meanderings of the current government.
We have all manner of major projects unfinished or unfunded in this territory. This territory urgently needs an overhaul of its planning system, working both from the top down and the bottom up.
Our vision of the city is a city with more concentrated urban centres and it must be encouraged and assisted. The benefits of this are manifest. Use of our scarce natural
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