Page 2909 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 29 June 2011
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detailed, and I would not expect it to be particularly detailed, based on some of your previous work.
Mr Barr: You are being a bit patronising now.
MR SMYTH: No, it is not patronising; it is actually the truth. Are you proud of the report that the Chief Minister dropped in the Assembly? Do you think it is a valid response to the tourism industry? They certainly do not. They were quite disgusted.
Mr Barr interjecting—
Mr Seselja: I note that he did not say yes.
MR SMYTH: He did not say yes; that is quite right. They were quite appalled that the whole industry was treated with such contempt. I think the minister last claimed that it was a $1½ billion industry, and it was treated with total contempt for its future development. It is a great industry. It has lots of potential here in the ACT—enormous potential. But it is not getting the leadership it deserves and it is certainly not getting the support it deserves.
One could go on for a long time about this area. Perhaps I will; perhaps I will not. The point is that what we have not seen is the support that the industry requires. It is particularly important for small business. Some questions were taken on notice about small business and some of the imposts on them. There is some work being done to look at harmonisation to ensure that there is ease of reporting. There are a few good things that are happening. I suspect the drive is coming from the federal bureaucracy, particularly out of the federal budget, so that we get things like standard business reporting for small business. It is federal government led; it is multijurisdictional. It is a good start to making sure that we make life easier for small businesses. They certainly deserve it.
There are an enormous number of small businesses in the ACT. Some of them are one and two-people shows—dad and mum sorts of businesses. What we need to do is make sure that they have a chance to reach their potential. One of the ways we have got to do that is to take the burden of particularly government paperwork off them so that they can get on with the job of growing their businesses.
When they grow their businesses, they present opportunities, they employ more Canberrans, they pay taxes to the government and they make this a more vibrant city and help diversify the economic base, which will be far more important in the future, particularly as, I suspect, there will be less certainty at some stage from commonwealth funding. As we all know, at some stage the government must rein in its spending. Unfortunately for the people of Canberra, that presents us with enormous problems if we have not got alternatives to simply living off commonwealth government money or land money.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Convenor, ACT Greens) (8.58): I would like to speak on two issues in this directorate—firstly, the government office building and, secondly, the clean economy strategy.
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