Page 4762 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 10 November 2009
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facilities and infrastructure. Coinciding with the government’s action to address the local effects of the global financial downturn, the commonwealth government, alongside, took decisive action to protect the national economy from the worst of the impacts, and the ACT has been working hard at implementing the stimulus package locally.
We appointed a coordinator general who works across the government to ensure delivery of the program. We are already seeing the benefits of this initiative through improved community infrastructure, especially in our schools, and new social housing developments that will provide improved opportunities for our citizens.
We have also been working with businesses, industry and the wider community to promote and enhance economic stability and capacity. This engagement and solid cooperation has been showing results, particularly in the private sector.
Whilst we still face some challenges in the near future, the recent ACT and Region Chamber of Commerce and Industry business confidence survey backs up an emerging picture of an economy that is now past the worst of the crisis. Four out of every five businesses surveyed increased or maintained their capital expenditure on buildings and plant and equipment in the September quarter.
We also continue to work alongside our business colleagues to mitigate any negative impact of the economic slowdown. We have undertaken initiatives such as the Chief Minister’s trade mission to the United Arab Emirates and the UK, the inaugural ACT business in focus month that was held in September, business roundtables, and the business health check service, which is a program to help local businesses identify ways to manage in turbulent times.
We also introduced a $25 million local initiatives package through the third appropriation which was aimed at supporting jobs in our local community. The local initiatives package was a modest program of additional capital projects worth $25 million over two years, giving local industry confidence that work is in the pipeline. To date, we have spent $12.4 million of the $12.7 million allocated for the first year. This has supported jobs through the delivery of public parks, footpath and cycling track upgrades, improvements at community facilities, including cancer services, infrastructure at Canberra Hospital and our ESA facilities, public schools and the CIT, new social housing developments, renovations, energy efficient upgrades and refurbishments to community and childcare facilities.
Throughout this difficult economic period, we have retained our AAA credit rating and this rating recognises the prudence of our fiscal and economic decisions and the underlying strength of our budget, and confirms the appropriateness of the approach we took with our budget plan, an important achievement given the pressure our budget has been put under by external forces caused by the global financial downturn.
We are also ensuring that we assist those Canberrans hit by financial uncertainty. We have implemented our mortgage relief program, a key plank of our 2008 election policy commitments, which will provide interest-free loans of up to $10,000 to eligible Canberra homeowners at risk of defaulting on their mortgage due to a sudden change in circumstances such as illness or unemployment.
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