Page 2747 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 June 2010
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What we did find out from the federal budget is that there is money to start the discussion about the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Gallipoli, which is five years away, and we support that money. It is worth that work starting early. Unfortunately, what we do not have from the Chief Minister’s federal Labor colleagues is a commitment to the nation’s capital. That is a shame: 2013 is a fabulous opportunity to make a statement about Canberra and put Canberra on the map, both nationally and internationally, for its second century and to say some things about the aspiration that the nation’s capital says about where we see ourselves as a country. Unfortunately, federal Labor is not interested and, unfortunately for the people of the ACT, the Chief Minister of the ACT does not have the clout to get the money that we are owed or the money that is deserved for this celebration. I think that is a shame—but not unexpected from a Chief Minister who displayed such poor knowledge of the aspects of his department.
You only have to go to output class 2.1, business and industry development. Business, as all would know, is very dear to my heart. It is also the future of the ACT. Clearly, we cannot rely on funding from the federal government, and the only way is to make our own way in the world and develop the ACT. Ms Le Couteur got to it before I did, but in the plan that the Chief Minister released in August 2008 about developing the ACT economy—and discussions on that plan—we heard from both the Chief Minister and from the head of the Chief Minister’s Department that it was the strategy and that a whole lot of plans were coming underneath it.
But when you go to the discussion in the Hansard on estimates, it is very unclear what the plans will be. There is something about, I think, how it has now morphed into the clean economy or the green economy, but it is very unclear when that will be available. There is something about film, and there is money there for film, but we are now going to have a roundtable to determine how that money will be spent.
How many roundtables is that? How many roundtables do you have to have? This is the budget; it is the expression of where you are going and where you are taking the territory for specifically the next year and then for the four-year period in front of us. But there is no strategy, there is no commitment here, particularly to the business community.
It is important to provide the right environment in which business can prosper. Yet we learn in this budget that there is an extra $58 million on taxpayers. If you are taking it out of business and taxpayers’ pockets, they are not spending that money in businesses around the ACT. So there is the first problem with this budget. What they are doing is hurting business.
We would have thought that the Chief Minister might well have been up on the environment that he is creating and, indeed, the assistance that he is giving to the business community, but the Chief Minister was not even aware that the government’s 2010-11 budget had actually reduced the business budget. You only have to go to the Hansard for 19 May and look at page 631 to know how badly they got this wrong:
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