Page 2981 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
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As an aside, I hope the Treasurer is not referring to the $84.8 million in table 2 of the commission’s report, because this is a per capita number and not an aggregate of the GST outcome.
Ms Gallagher: No, I’m not.
MR SMYTH: I am pleased that you are not, because we know that, in the end, the loss was nowhere near the $80 million scare campaign that the Treasurer was putting out.
Ms Gallagher: It was.
MR SMYTH: The Treasurer insists, just building up the list of excuses for her ineptitude at managing the ACT economy. The very real issue for the people of the ACT is for the Treasurer to set out the details of her deficit reduction strategy and, in doing so, not propose increasing taxes, as this will place a cap on economic activity in the territory and retard growth. We really do not see a deficit reduction strategy. We have got a hope that it will come back a year earlier than outlined but that is all we have. We have hope. Given the unreliability of the estimates that this Treasurer, in particular, has put forward over the last couple of years, just about anything could happen.
It does then lead to: where does this money come from? There appear to be simply two sources to this money. (Second speaking period taken.) We get an enormous proportion of our funding from the commonwealth, we have some own-source revenue or we can look for new sources of revenue. What we have in this document is a total failure to provide for the economic diversification of the ACT.
The Treasurer said earlier this week that they were investing in business in the ACT. They have got a very strange way of investing in the business community in the ACT, because they have cut funding for business in the ACT. That is a very strange notion of how to diversify. Indeed, although it is not her portfolio she must have some feeling for how economic diversification would benefit the bottom line.
We cannot get a straight answer as to when, for instance, the document on the clean economy might turn up. We cannot get a straight answer on what are the other plans that the government are going to put together to enable the delivery of their economic blue print. In that regard, this is a Treasurer that has failed to provide any sense of vision or direction for the future of the ACT economy and continues, of course, the failure of the Chief Minister to articulate any sense of vision for the future of the ACT economy.
We have had the economic white paper, and this at least had some sense of vision for the ACT economy. Unfortunately, as that policy development was undertaken by former Treasurer Ted Quinlan and that heritage means that the paper is now redundant, there is now truly an effective void in terms of strategy for the ACT economy—a clear strategy with clear targets and a clear pathway to achieve those targets. Not much more can be said, other than to acknowledge the total failure of the government in this important area of public policy. If it is not enough that we do not have a plan
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