Page 2060 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 21 June 2011
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guidelines for it, and we would like to know what progress will be made in supporting the Australia Forum.
Also in economic development, the minister spoke of a number of areas he saw as areas ripe for development—tourism, sport, aviation, education and the training industries. As members will know, I am keen on these areas, and we do have from 2008 the government’s Canberra plan: towards our second century, their economic development plan. We were told at previous hearings that plans would come. It is about time we saw those plans. So the minister will be busy and we look forward to seeing some of those plans in December 2011 and hopefully, by the first sitting day in April 2012, the industry development plans for the construction, information, communication, defence and science and technology industries as well.
There were some other recommendations about potential airline flights and how we progress the clean economy. In this area also is Tourism, Venues and Events, and there are a number of recommendations. A number of the things that I would have liked to have seen remain in the report did not make it. So on the bottom of page 88 there is quite a substantial footnote about what I believe should happen with Enlighten.
The committee received in camera a report by Ernst & Young for the ACT government. We thank the minister for that. But I think it is fair to say that you were at quite a loss as to what was commercial-in-confidence in there. Commercial-in-confidence might be your mailing list or your list of suppliers. It might be the formula for the beverage that you sell. It might be the industrial process. It could be many things. But what is contained in the report is basically a summary of what happened. How that reveals some process is beyond me, but there is a recommendation about the utilisation of commercial-in-confidence.
There is a recommendation about how the government should indeed detail how it will improve Enlighten, given that almost a third of the tickets to Enlighten were given away. There are always tickets given away for promotional or other reasons, but a third on its first outing seems quite extraordinary to me. I would be delighted to hear where another event has had a third of its tickets given away for its first event.
In Health, we looked at a number of areas, particularly elective surgery waiting lists, and there are a number of recommendations there. We also looked at the new hospital and the need to see the roles delineated. There are recommendations there. In regard to the site for the new hospital, the committee would like to understand the logic behind that when the government makes a decision.
In education, there are also a number of good recommendations about the expenditure of that money. Indeed, there were some that did not quite make the cut. I am concerned that on the day we had part of the education portfolio before us, the minister released his glossy document. The only real initiative is to form a committee and we will see a blueprint sometime in the future on how the government will address the almost 14 per cent differential between the number of students in government primary schools and the number of students in government high schools, an important issue and something that needs to be addressed.
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