Page 2300 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 22 June 2011
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MRS DUNNE: Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. I table the following paper:
Water charges—ACTEW total bill per household and water bill per household—Table and graphs.
This table is an analysis by the ICRC of the cost of water over the years. It was updated at my request after the last increase in water bills. For a typical household in the ACT, where they use 250,000 litres of water a year, we see that the cost of water since 2001 has risen from $245 a year, in 2010-11 to $692 a year and in 2011-12 it will rise to $794 a year. So we have now had well over a 200 per cent increase in the cost of water since the arrival of the Stanhope, now Gallagher-Hunter, government.
This is a matter that these people do not care about. They say that that is not important. Ms Gallagher is saying with her amendment that, with the taxes and charges, total taxation has gone up by 75 per cent. But there are a whole lot of other things that contribute to the cost of living that this government is responsible for.
In this period of time we have seen huge charges introduced by this government which have driven up the cost of water—the water abstraction charge, which is now, of course, subject to a High Court appeal, and in addition to this, the supervision of this Chief Minister and her predecessor over the largest blow-out in a capital works project that this territory has ever seen, which, by the admission of the head of Actew, will add another $120 a year, every year, to the cost of water over the life of the dam.
In addition to that, I would like to talk about childcare. Again, childcare is one of the big drivers of family costs. Mr Seselja spoke about the impact of education and I would like to talk about the impact of childcare in this area. We have seen over many years the cost of childcare increasing, year on year, so that we see in the ACT that we now pay $60 per child per week more than the national average. This is an unsustainable burden.
The government’s solution to this, of course, is to drive up the cost further through their signing up to the national quality framework which, on the surface, as we all know, sounds wonderful. We all believe in improved quality and we all believe in improved frameworks. But this government and the federal government have not taken into consideration what this means for families—that childcare will become unaffordable and that many children will either be taken out of childcare or at least taken out of formal childcare. We have to remember that for every child in formal childcare there is another child in informal childcare who is not receiving the benefits of a professional childcare and early learning process through a formal day care centre, and they will be the losers. All the people who depart the childcare system will be the losers and the cost pressures in the ACT are driving people out of childcare. (Time expired.)
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (4.37): I want to start with some of the comments of Ms Hunter. Ms Hunter is very good at setting up straw men. She declares that there is a class war, that only the Greens care for the poor, and that the Liberals are only interested in the rich and the middle class. It is a good tactic. When you cannot answer
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