Page 2978 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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MR SESELJA: This is interesting, isn’t it? The Chief Minister thinks it is funny that Canberra families are footing the bill. She thinks it is funny that Canberra families are footing the bill in their electricity costs for her bad schemes. And the government are not interested in fixing their bad scheme; they are just going to sit there and deal with it. She thinks it is funny that small businesses are now copping the brunt of the scheme being handled so badly that in the dead of night it had to be cancelled.
But we will get to that, and maybe the Chief Minister can contribute to that debate—or will she just leave it to Mr Corbell, because it is a dog. The way it has been handled, it is a shocker. But all of these things affect families. And when you have a government that does not restrain its expenditure, that pursues bad policies, that still runs deficits even in the best of times, even when there are record revenues coming in, then Canberra families will pay. And eventually they will not be able to pay any more. There is only so much that Canberra families can bear.
When your wages are going up at about two per cent or three per cent but your rates are going up six per cent and your electricity is going up 10 per cent, as well as your food and your petrol—
Ms Gallagher interjecting—
MR SESELJA: and your water is going up well above that, it hurts. I did not quite get the interjection there from the Chief Minister. I am not sure if she was contributing to the debate there with—
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Mr Seselja, please do not return fire.
MR SESELJA: Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker. So is the position of the Chief Minister now that wages really are going up as much as all of those things—that wages really are keeping up with the cost of electricity, the cost of water, the cost of rates, the cost of rents, the cost of petrol and the cost of groceries?
These are real issues for Canberra families. I think that recommendation 35 of the estimates report, which has effectively been rejected—(Second speaking period taken.)—by the government, is a real demonstration of their attitude to this issue. Their attitude seems to be: “Given we can’t fix all of the cost of living pressures, we’ll do nothing. We won’t try.” You cannot fix all of the cost of living pressures, but you can directly set a number of them. You can directly influence things like your rates which you set. You can virtually directly influence the cost of water because how well you manage your utility will help to determine how much people pay for water. You can indirectly, but quite influentially, influence the cost of buying a home in Canberra through both taxes and land release. You can very strongly influence the cost of renting a home. Again, putting taxes, like the government are, on units obviously feeds into that cost.
So we have a whole range of direct costs, and all of those are going up significantly, above inflation. We have indirect costs which the government influences, and they are going up well above inflation, and there are other things like electricity which clearly
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