Page 1595 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
financial institutions, by academic institutions around this concept of a green economy, green collar jobs and how we can shift our economy to be far more sustainable into the future.
Another area, of course, is around making our houses more energy efficient. My colleague Shane Rattenbury introduced an exposure draft of a bill this week. It seeks to ensure that rental properties are up to speed in respect of energy efficiency. Another part of that, of course, is that if that gets through, there will be ongoing support and ongoing work for businesses to keep going here in the territory. We very much need to look at the opportunities we have to shift to a green economy and I hope that this budget gets us one step closer.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (4.07): I would like to say that I am delighted my colleague Mr Hanson has brought this MPI on today. It is a very important issue and, yes, it is good of the Treasurer to point out that we often have economic discussions in the lead-up to the budget. Who would figure that politicians would want to talk about the single most important bill of the year in the lead-up to that bill? I am just surprised; I am so surprised.
But what I am more surprised over is that the Treasurer had so little to say about her budget—so much so that she spent six of her 15 minutes attacking the Liberal Party and reliving history. She was not just reliving it; she was rewriting history and saying how badly the budget was off when they came to office because there were all these things unfunded.
The interesting thing is that the money was there to fund them because the government did so in the following budget. They did not have to find it. It was there, and it was there because what we left was a strong economy. What we left was an economy and a budget that could cope with the things that we had promised. That is unlike what we inherited in 1995, when we had a $344 million operating loss left by the previous Labor government. It was $344 million! It was more than a 20 per cent loss on the turnover of that year; $344 million.
In the six years after that, of course, following Follett, there were the cuts by the Howard government; there was collapse of HIH; there was the Ansett collapse; there was the SARS tragedy; and then, of course, there was the Asian meltdown. They were things which we coped with and we still brought the budget back into the black and left the budget in a great position for the incoming Labor government to spend the next 10 years wasting those opportunities. They were 10 years of reckless spending, 10 years of failing to diversify the ACT economy and to prepare for the future.
Ms Gallagher complains that people thought her budgets were boring. They are probably boring because there have been no ideas in them. There has been no drive; there has been no choice; there has been no initiative to say: “We are going to take this economy and we are going to do something with it because we understand the potential of having the federal government here. We understand the potential of having the departments here. We understand the potential of having the largest contract signed in the country signed in Canberra with government departments. We understand the potential of five universities and all their campuses here in the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video