Page 2099 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 May 2009
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economic recession calls for a new vision that will ensure our economic prosperity while protecting our environment, and today we can see that the Labor-Greens parliamentary agreement is beginning to deliver this vision for the people of Canberra.
The Greens are taking a long-term approach and beginning to change the direction of future planning to deliver strong social, economic and environmental outcomes over the full economic cycle. The Greens brought to the table a range of specific and innovative policy measures that we have seen funded in this budget. And we welcome those initiatives. But it is a new way of thinking about being genuinely sustainable that we look forward to seeing from the government in the years ahead.
However, it is a sad indictment that, over a decade of strong economic growth in the ACT, previous territory governments did not use the good times to build a bank balance large enough to cope with this downturn, the inevitable bust after a long and very comfortable boom. Nor did previous territory governments maintain adequate ongoing infrastructure spending, leaving us playing catch-up now. It looks like another example of politics trumping the long-term interests of the community, with the needs of the business cycle subservient to those of the election cycle. Therefore, it appears that it is recent local history that has brought us to the budget we have, as much as has a global financial market crisis.
We understand the scale of the external impacts on our revenue and on the need for stimulus spending. But we do not agree that we are naive victims of global forces. The ACT was not well enough prepared and had only pursued a medium-term agenda. Our policy platform restores the value of the medium and long-term agenda. The Greens will be championing the importance of having that medium and longer-term agenda for the life of the Assembly and beyond.
An important part of our platform is that recurrent spending and capital investments made now must deliver medium and long-term community benefits. In health, for example, we value the benefits of wellness as opposed to dealing with illness; a distinction lost on those driven by talkback radio noise on the latest apparent medical crisis.
In line with most governments in Western economies, we in the ACT are looking to soften the impact of a global recession by boosting capital investments and pumping public funds into infrastructure. Our concern is not that this is putting the ACT budget into deficit but that the budget is based largely on spending for its own sake. It looks too much like an attempt to use public money to maintain the last gasp of a boom, trying to maintain a direction for the ACT economy which will continue our journey on a path which leading international thinkers are telling us needs to change direction—and change direction now.
Bricks and mortar capital works will be welcomed by the engineers and construction teams who will build them and by the people who will use the facilities once the ribbons are cut. But we need more from this investment—much more if it is to genuinely improve our quality of life in the ACT. We need guarantees that in putting the vast majority of the territory’s stimulus money into capital works these capital works take huge steps forward in terms of reduced environmental impact and
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