Page 1116 - Week 03 - Thursday, 18 March 2010
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Mr Coe: What have you done? What have you done, Jon?
MR STANHOPE: I said this in answer to a question within the last three minutes. Mr Coe interjects to ask me to answer a question which I just responded to, which I just provided in the last couple of minutes. Ms Bresnan, yes, we accept the role and the place that there is for park-and-ride facilities and we are committed to expanding park-and-ride facilities across the whole of the ACT. We will seek to prioritise our capital funding, including in the upcoming budget, to incorporate additional park-and-ride facilities, but those are decisions that will be made in the context of the capacity of this particular budget to meet all of the territory’s needs.
Economy—diversification
MR SMYTH: My question is to the Treasurer. Treasurer, on 6 May 2009, during a debate on the ACT economy, you said:
Government administration and defence account for around 31 per cent of the ACT economy. It would be unrealistic to think that this proportion would change in any significant way, even with major government intervention.
Treasurer, what initiatives have you taken to increase the size of the private sector in the ACT economy?
MS GALLAGHER: The focus that I have taken in the past year, particularly post the global financial crisis, has been to take advice from industry about what support they are after from government. The main focus was to maintain employment in the territory. So the decisions we took were to continue to invest and, in fact, to allow for record investment in our capital program to put work out into the ACT when others were not investing at a pace that they had been in previous years and to support business that way, to support employment and to support the economy more broadly through the efforts by which we could, as a small but sizable part of the ACT economy, show confidence in them. That is what we have done. I think if you look at all the economic indicators, it will show that that strategy has been successful.
MR SPEAKER: A supplementary question, Mr Smyth?
MR SMYTH: Thank you, Mr Speaker. Treasurer, given the actions you claim to have taken, what has been the increase in the size of the private sector in the ACT economy since your actions started?
MS GALLAGHER: As I said, Mr Speaker, the focus in the past 12 months has been to maintain jobs in the ACT to support the private sector going through an extremely difficult time, a time that they had never seen or experienced before. We provided them with the support they needed. Indeed, I think if you go and talk to industry groups about that, all of them unanimously say that the local initiatives package and the capital program that we rolled out has supported them to maintain employment and maintain work to the point that some of them have asked us to wind back some of that work.
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