Page 3459 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 18 August 2010
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
a $2.1 billion promise for a rail link. What do we get in the ACT? Did we get Majura funded? No, we did not. Did we get even the promise that they have for Constitution Avenue? No, we did not. We have seen them renege on the promises.
We can go through where they have made the actual sackings in good fiscal times. They inherited good fiscal times and they still felt the need to sack. How are they going to go when they come back with their—what is the deficit this year, federally?—$40 billion deficit, which will be largely as a result of all of the promises they are making around marginal seats, best exemplified by the $2.1 billion for one seat?
If you are going to spend $2.1 billion to get one member re-elected in Sydney, who is going to pay? Who is going to pay for that? Who is going to pay to get the budget back into surplus? I guarantee it: under Labor, it will be the ACT. Have they shown any regard for the people of the ACT? Have they shown that they want to help us fund our infrastructure? No. I think I heard the Labor candidate on the radio today saying there have been hundreds of millions for road infrastructure in the ACT from the commonwealth. Where? Where are those hundreds of millions from the commonwealth? They have ignored Canberra.
Again, they have ignored Canberra. They take it for granted. They think they own the place and they shift the money to the marginal seats, the pork barrels in marginal seats—$2.1 billion for one seat. We can only imagine what is going on and what the total bill will be. We can only imagine what the total bill will be.
We go back a couple of years to a time when federal Labor came in, with an inherited $20 billion surplus; yet they were still looking to make cuts. Their first instinct was to come in and make cuts. And who cheered them on the loudest here? Jon Stanhope. He said, “The reason it has done so is the inflation bogy.” Before the first federal Labor budget in the last term, Jon Stanhope said, “Yes, you should be cutting these institutions. You should be cutting the public service because of the inflation bogy,” the non-existent inflation bogy. It was not there.
They manufactured a reason. They had a $20 billion surplus that they had inherited and they still felt the need to make cuts. That is the record of Labor federally. And the record of ACT Labor is to cheer them on. No matter what, they will cheer them on. They will pretend that they care about Canberra but if it is a Labor government they will simply accept whatever rubbish is put up. And the inflation bogy was one of the most embarrassing economic arguments ever put forward by a federal government. It simply did not exist.
There is no doubt that we had a well-managed economy under the coalition. And if we look at what they inherited, they inherited, I think, an unemployment rate in the ACT of about 2½ per cent. That is where it was when the coalition left office. It underlines the point: if you manage the economy well, in the end the whole nation prospers, including the ACT. And that is what we saw. I defy anyone—I defy any of the Labor members or the Green members—to get up and say that, for the vast majority of the Howard government, the ACT did not do well.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video