Page 3031 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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never achieved at any time in the history of territory politics. It has never been able to run a budget surplus. We were able to do so. We have significant cash reserves. The ACT has the strongest balance sheet, equal to if not the strongest balance sheet of any state or territory. That is down to the good work of Mr Stanhope when he was Treasurer and now Ms Gallagher as Treasurer. We have strong economic leadership in the territory, provided by the Australian Labor Party.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (5.34): It is always difficult to know where to start when Mr Barr gives one of his rants. You are not sure whether or not he has consulted an economics textbook quickly before he has come down and given us his tutorial on economics. It is always quite enlightening, because it is always sprinkled with the ridiculous use of cliches, Orwellian language and, of course, a complete failure to ever come up with any ideas. This is the man all of whose ideas are taken from the other side of politics. It happens consistently. On economics, whether it is in the planning system or whether it is his ideas in education, he is constantly looking to the other side to get his ideas. There has not been one original idea to come from him in all of his time as a minister.
We heard the lecture he started with on microeconomic reform. Of course, the centrepiece of his broad microeconomic reform agenda was to get rid of the EPIC board. Getting rid of the EPIC board was the big issue of the day. Let us face it: that is what the punters are talking about. When they think microeconomic reform in the ACT, they think about that EPIC board. Instead of having a board of independent people, they thought that they could have two boards. We could have the advisory council on top of the board or we could just bring it back into the department and we could have a little more centralised bureaucratic control, a little less independent advice and the $50,000 that was going to be saved from this significant and wide-ranging microeconomic reform unfortunately was not realised.
This is the record. He tried one ridiculous attempt at what he calls microeconomic reform and it failed. It was rejected because it needed to be rejected. It was a bad idea. Mr Barr sort of gives me a lot of credit. I am very pleased that he believes that I am so powerful, that I had three votes in the estimates committee, that I was able to control three votes and I was able to get through whatever I wanted. He says that the estimates committee report is indeed simply a reflection of the whims of the Leader of the Opposition. It is a completely ridiculous statement made by Mr Barr and it seems that when he goes off the playbook of cliches, he tends to struggle. If he is not saying “Take the politics out of planning,” or accusing us of “opposition for opposition’s sake,” he does not seem to have much substance there.
The other aspect we have in Mr Barr’s speech is the new approach of being nice to the Greens. We know that the area of greatest challenge has been Mr Barr’s prickly relationship with the Greens. Now he has decided that he is going to be nice to them. He did not quite get over the line. He was his usual patronising self when he was being nice to them. He did talk down to them as he said they are trying hard, but it is an interesting shift.
We were not sure at the time. We thought it was just a factional stitch-up in terms of the Treasurer’s job, but perhaps it was actually the caucus coming to the view that he
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