Page 2983 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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Assembly, very lucky to be served by such a professional organisation. They do a lot of work with a modest appropriation and relatively small numbers of staff. I think they deliver an outstanding service to the people of the ACT, and I would like to thank them for it.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Convenor, ACT Greens) (12.18): When I had my earlier 10 minutes I was saying that there was limited scope for a significant increase in manufacturing but that at the same time we should be looking for opportunities to encourage sustainable business to see the ACT as a viable option for their operations. The construction and housing industries are big players in our economy. This is certainly one area where we can drastically change the way we are doing things so that our buildings are more sustainable and we give the people who work in the industries new skills. We know there will be an ever-increasing demand for these skills. This will be an issue for many years to come. There is much that we can do even in a small jurisdiction dominated by the federal public service.
I would like to briefly turn to the issue of GST revenue. We did lose out in this year’s relativities, and there now appears to be a level of uncertainty around the future direction of the relativity calculations as the current review runs its course. We should be aware of the concern that exists from the dominance of the larger states in that review. We hope that the review does not lead to a reduction in our share of the pie; I think we are all cognisant of the risks of this at present.
I note that inflation is rising. It is probably fair to say that inflationary pressures are now evident across many developed and developing countries. For some time now, there has been, if not a consensus, a general suggestion that interest rates will rise in the not too distant future. This will, of course, have an impact across Canberra. It has been picked up by Mr Seselja and Mr Smyth—around the cost of living and the pressures of the cost of living on many Canberrans. I do not think you can just refer to Canberra families; it is on all Canberrans. As legislators, we need to have a look at what we can do to relieve some of that pressure.
Some of it is outside our control—such as food prices. Being the mother of three very hungry sons who are growing every minute, I know that the food bill is a real impost each week. Those things are outside our control. We need to be looking at how we can assist. And we need to start with those who are the most vulnerable, those who are really going to fall into the poverty traps that are caused by increasing energy prices. That is going to happen. We know that our utility bills will continue to rise into the future. There is no doubt about it.
That is why we did welcome very much the increase in the utility concessions to low income Canberra families and Canberra individuals who really are finding it tough during the winter months. When that heating bill comes in, that $131 increase will make a difference in many of those people’s lives. We are also pleased to see that it will have an indexation measure built into it so that it will not fall behind as it did a number of years ago. This is catch-up, but I am pleased to see that into the future it will have that indexation added on. We will make sure that, in some way, it does try and keep in line with the rising utility costs.
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