Page 1431 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 24 March 2010
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What is true, though, is that Ms Hunter was less than constructive and had very little substance in what she had to say. Some days it is hard to work out what party Ms Hunter actually represents. She had said she was the party of third party insurance. I thought a third party insurance party would have been interested in looking after vulnerable Canberrans, but perhaps that is just a fraud.
The contribution from the would-be Chief Minister, the Treasurer, was very instructive because the Deputy Chief Minister, the Treasurer, went to options for balancing the budget. She said we could raise taxes or we could cut services. Of course, she forgot about the third option, which was to diversify the economy, and then staggered back to it when she realised her mistake—
Mr Seselja: Spend more efficiently.
MR SMYTH: It is a very efficient way of improving the lot of Canberrans if we can get there. Let us look at the record on this and what various ministers have said. The Chief Minister said:
I acknowledge that the ACT does have a limited economic base.
He said this on 8 April 2008 and then he went on to say:
… we have to acknowledge that economic diversity opportunities are limited, but we do have strengths in other areas.
They may be limited, but have you worked at maximising the return from the areas that you have got? Indeed, have you looked outside the square to get a better result? On 6 May 2009 the Treasurer said:
… no-one one will argue against having a diversified economic base.
No, nobody will argue against it; it is just that the government will not do anything about it. And that is part of the reason that we find ourselves in the problem that we are in. The Treasurer went on to say:
Does he mean a larger share of the private sector in the economy?
Her response to her own question was:
It would be unrealistic to think that this proportion would change in any significant way, even with major government intervention.
That is the proportion of private to public sector. When we came to office in 1995, 60 per cent of the ACT employment base was public sector. When we left in 2001, 60 per cent was in the private sector. So you can in a short period of time turn it around. In six years, the former Liberal government turned it around. But the ACT Labor government have now turned it around again and the last confirmed number I saw was 55 per cent, so it had gone from 60 to 55 per cent as private sector employment, and I suspect it is even less now.
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