Page 2059 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 21 June 2011
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Chapter 2 is a separate chapter on the government office block. The government office block was an area of great interest to many members. We probably had the largest committee meeting ever in the history of the Assembly, where there were 10 people, including the minister, sitting on one side of the table and there were 10 members on the other side. It was well and truly something that Assembly members were interested in.
There are a number of recommendations. I think the easiest recommendation for members to look at is recommendation 6:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government provide the ACT Legislative Assembly with additional information to support a decision on the Government office building.
The committee also recommended that the government table their response to the public accounts committee. There are three recommendations that basically say the government do nothing until PAC has had time to make a report back to the Assembly. They are important recommendations.
The next chapter then of course is Treasury. On the day of the budget, the Treasurer, now Chief Minister, said, “We now need to stand on our own two feet.” There is a section in the chapter on Treasury called “Stand on our own two feet” that reads:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government table, by no later than the first sitting day in December 2011, the plan to enable the ACT to stand on its own two feet through diversifying its economic base, instead of being so totally dependent on Federal funding and land based taxation.
So I look forward to that sitting day in December. It is important, if we are to stand on our own two feet and if it is not just lip-service, that we actually do achieve that and it is important that we achieve it. There are a number of other areas covered in the Treasury section and I would commend them to members.
In the Chief Minister’s area, one of the issues that were largely talked about with the Chief Minister was infrastructure, in particular the Majura parkway. And there is a recommendation on how the government, in particular the Chief Minister, might handle the Majura parkway issue.
As members go through the report, they will see at the bottom of some pages there are quite substantial footnotes. We took a differing approach this year in that where members had comments or indeed recommendations that were not supported by all of their colleagues and therefore were dropped out of the report or were not put into the report, to give the context of where they occurred in the discussion rather than tack them on at the end as a different view or indeed rather than go to a dissenting report, members took the opportunity to put in place their comment in situ, as it were.
The next chapter looks at economic development, and there are a number of important recommendations. First and foremost, there is an acknowledgement of the money the government has put forward for the Australia Forum, and the committee welcomed that. We would like to know how that $1 million is to be spent, what are the
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