Page 2977 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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At some point the government have to take this seriously. They cannot just pretend that their policies do not impact on families; they do. And every policy decision has an impact, every piece of legislation has an impact, every spending decision has an impact. For all of the photo ops when you make a spending decision, if you get those spending decisions wrong and you spend it in the wrong places, Canberrans pay.
I think that many families are feeling the pinch, and that is before the possibility of interest rate rises which may be around the corner. It is uncertain and we hope that interest rates come down rather than go up. But there are Canberrans who are mortgaged to the hilt. Anyone who has bought a home in Canberra in the last five to eight years in particular has had to take out a pretty significant mortgage—mortgages of upwards of $300,000 and $400,000 just to be getting into the market.
If you have a mortgage of $400,000, which is not uncommon for a family that has bought recently, not only do you feel those interest rate rises but you feel all of those other rises because so much of your income is already going to pay off your mortgage. So when the groceries go up, you feel it. But then the ACT government come in over the top of that. They cannot control the grocery prices but they can control their spending, they can control the rates that they set, they can decide which taxes and charges to increase and to levy. They have decided that taxing renters is a good way to go, that taxing them much more than they have ever been taxed before is a good way to go. That will feed in to rents, that will feed in to the cost of buying a unit. When they waste the money and have to see 5.6 per cent or 6 per cent increases just this year for people in Tuggeranong on their rates, Canberrans feel that. When they have bad policies like the feed-in-tariff which we have to try and fix up later on today—
Ms Gallagher: Is that right?
MR SESELJA: Well, that is exactly right. What a mess.
Ms Gallagher: I was wondering how you were going to justify that.
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Mr Hargreaves): Order, members! So far it has been good.
MR SESELJA: It is an absolute mess. I can tell you this, Mr Assistant Speaker—
Ms Gallagher interjecting—
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER: The Chief Minister will come to order, please.
MR SESELJA: what we will be doing is bringing the cost of that down. That is the bottom line. We will look to make a bad spend less expensive for Canberra families and to help business transition through what has been handled in a shocking way. So when you have policies like that, that feeds in to electricity—
Ms Gallagher: The master!
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