Page 1054 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 17 March 2010
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street. If someone is giving money to something then you would think they would get something in return. But here we have the minister taking money off the racing sector, taking money off the racing community, and refusing to invest a reasonable portion back into the very industry they are taking it from. It is absolutely absurd.
The executive summary of the document prepared by Access Economics goes on to say:
The product fee model proposed by the ACT Government would result in five fewer race meetings per annum in 2010-11 compared with the product fee model proposed in this paper. This reduction in races is estimated to reduce employment by 85 FTEs of direct and indirect employment, or allowing for part time and casual work, 400 fewer people wholly or partly depending on CRC for employment. Any further reduction in employment due to a loss of critical mass for racing in the ACT—resulting in the loss of supporting industries—would be in addition to that.
It is all very real. If the minister had sat down with the CRC and the other racing bodies we might not be in this situation. They might not have had to have gone and spent the money. They had to go and spend money on this sort of report because you were unwilling to sit down with them and negotiate properly. Perhaps if you had done that they would not have spent their members’ money on Access Economics reports like this when they should be putting it into their community. Instead, they are forced into doing that. I commend them for doing so. I commend them for looking at a way forward. What the Canberra Racing Club is doing is showing far more strategy and far more vision than this minister.
Mr Barr interjecting—
MR COE: The minister is harping on. Obviously he has been affected by this. It has struck a raw nerve. Obviously he realises the CRC are being far more strategic and visionary than he is. Why? Because they are actually concerned about their industry, as opposed to you, minister. You are not in the least bit concerned about the future of racing and the future of 85 FTE jobs in the ACT. It is pretty disappointing. The economic impacts of the report are listed in the Access Economics report:
The economic impact of the CRC has been provided in previous submissions by CRC to the ACT Government. In summary, the impact is …total direct spending of $36.9 million.
$48.6 million in real gross value added, or 0.48% of the ACT total.
50,000 on-course attendances in 2005-06 …
Direct and indirect employment of 422 Full time Equivalents (FTE), or allowing for casual and part time employment, 2,000 direct and indirect persons are wholly or partly reliant on racing for employment.
It is all very real. Unfortunately, the only thing that is not real is what we have from the minister, who is refusing to communicate in a sensible way. We have seen that
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