Page 1596 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
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ACT. We understand the potential of having the CSIRO’s headquarters here. We understand the potential of the smartest population in the country and their ability to come up with solutions.”
Yes, Treasury, your budgets are boring because they lack leadership, they lack ideas, they lack drive, they lack answers to the problems that face the community because of the lack of courage that your government has, has had and will continue to have in the future—well, at least for the next 81 weeks.
Ms Hunter makes a point. She says, “What about recycling? What about waste?” We had a program to address waste in the ACT. It was called no waste by 2010. But 2010 has come and gone and the 2010 target was missed. What was missed, most importantly, were the industries that the Liberal government said back in 1996 would be required to achieve the target of 2010.
We had a problem. What we wanted to do was take a problem and turn it into an opportunity. We saw that that opportunity would create new industries that would answer problems not that we had for ourselves here in the ACT but that all jurisdictions around the world had, thereby giving us a more diversified economy. It has just gone. The opportunities are just gone. They are not thought of. No waste by 2010 is now just no waste. It should actually be recycled because it is waste. It is a waste of an opportunity.
That is why, Madam Treasurer, as you return to this place, I say that your budgets are boring. They lack leadership, they lack drive and, God help us, when you take over as Chief Minister we will get the same boring approach. The attitude is, “We are good because we spend, we should be admired because we spend so much of your money and, by the way, we are going to take more money out of your pockets because we cannot stop our reckless spending.”
That cycle is self-fulfilling and that is how you get $344 million operating losses. That is how you get streams of deficits. That is how you get a government that budgets for deficits at the height of a boom. At the height of the boom you manage to outspend your revenue and put us in the parlous position that we find ourselves in. As I said, Madam Assistant Speaker, I am delighted that my colleague brought this on for discussion today because it is an important issue.
Mr Hanson touched on something that we all should be quite aware of, given that the federal government is signalling a tough budget and that more cuts have to be found in our local budget, Chris Faulks, the CEO of the Canberra Business Council, said this back in 2009, “Our concern beyond that is that at the same time the ACT will be clawing back its deficit”—which is happening now—“the federal government will also be clawing back a very substantial deficit,” which is happening now. She went on to say, “When those two occur at the same time, the pain for the ACT is going to be significantly compounded. The worst case scenario is a perfect storm”.
You get the perfect storm when you do not plan. You get the perfect storm when you do not make allowances for the future. You get the perfect storm following 10 years of reckless spending when you make no allowance for the future.
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