Page 2750 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 June 2010
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Mr Corbell is here; he has still got a couple of corkers. We will get to that in ESA, though, about the cost of the headquarters.
But, when you look at the two-pager that Ms Gallagher has written, she says, for instance, “The above list are examples and are not exhaustive, rather they are illustrative,” and she runs through the errors in the report. But there is detail in the report. We go to the nub of the matter. It is concise. It is accurate. It has analysis, and the government has failed to answer it.
I hope the Chief Minister will speak about this. I hope he will actually give us a timetable of the plans and their release—about how he will deliver capital development towards our second century. But then again he might be on his bike, he might not be interested about capital development shortly anyway, so who knows.
The other recommendation on that page is that the Minister for Business and Economic Development inform the Legislative Assembly of the outcomes of the roundtable concerning the ACT Film Investment Fund as soon as possible after the roundtable. We are very interested in that.
Of course, the third recommendation is that the Minister for Business and Economic Development table in the Legislative Assembly, before the commencement of the budget debate, the clean economy paper. The government apparently has the paper. I am not sure why it is being withheld; it would be reasonable to have it for the debate today. But perhaps, if you have got no intention of following through with it, that might be the real reason you would not want to deliver it.
The other part in the portfolio of great interest to me is output class 3, which is tourism. I think tourism, as was spoken about in the estimates, is really a sad case of the approach taken by the Labor government. Anything in the 2010 budget does not change that view. Where do we start?
First and foremost, there is a mishmash of coordination of tourism activities. There is an extreme lack of funding for the Tourism Industry Council. It is the worst funded tourism industry council in the country—bar none. It is our biggest industry independent of government; it is the worst assisted by government.
We have got this ephemeral new autumn tourism event—something about lights. There has been funding for the convention bureau, but I believe there should be more. We have got the saga of low-cost accommodation, and, of course, there is the whole issue of growth in tourism from China. According to the national figures, the number one destination for the Chinese is Australia and yet we abandoned our tourism activities in China. There is a failure to make additional investment in tourism in 2010, and I think the biggest losers from this are the people of Canberra—and, in that, particularly young people and women, who are often most likely to be employed in tourism.
Mr Barr lauds this investment in tourism, but he does not deliver. It is all words and no action. He lauds the Masterpieces exhibition, but then fails to explain how this was a new autumn event. It is not a new autumn event. It was a one-off opportunity that
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