Page 239 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 15 February 2012
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property who will lose. The banks are not going to allow this charge to be passed on through the development. There has to be a squeeze here somewhere, and the squeeze will come at the owner end. If you have lived in the inner north for 40, 50 or 60 years and this is your retirement block that you are going to sell, you have just had it diminished by the value of the government surcharge depending on what suburb you live in. That is the problem with this argument. That is the reason we will not be supporting this motion today.
I think the motion is disingenuous at best and downright—I think we are not allowed to use the word “deceitful” but I will use it anyway; you can make me withdraw it if you want—deceitful at worst. It creates this illusion that the government have found a tax that has no effect and that now magically, having that tax, they are going to hypothecate it to a service they should already have been delivering. Lo and behold, just before an election is called, we are going to see a mammoth effort of mowing grass and sweeping streets and fixing footpaths and fixing up local parks—things that should have been done.
If a member of the Labor Party had bothered to turn up at Tuggeranong Community Council the other night they would have heard what people said they wanted done in the election year. They said that they wanted the local things done better. They want their roads maintained better, they want their parks maintained better, they want their urban amenity maintained better and they want their lake foreshore maintained better. They want these things because the government have failed in delivering them. Here we are, 11 years into their term, and they have suddenly woken up to the fact that they have not maintained the city to the level that it should be.
You just need to drive in from, say, the airport to Parkes Way and the new Kings Avenue flyover. The airport bit of those roads is particularly well maintained. The new Parkes Way overpass is beautifully maintained—mainly because it is new, I guess—but the bit in the middle is a disgrace. The main entrance from the airport into the city is overgrown with weeds. The grass is long and overgrown. The amount of rubbish there is dreadful. The road is a patchwork, a veritable quilt of bitumen, because the government have not, over the years, properly allocated and spent their funds. They suddenly suggest that this extra money will fix it. I do not believe they know how to fix it. I do not believe they know how to manage their funds. I do not believe they know how to deliver good services for people at the local level.
I say again: had they been at Tuggeranong Community Council—and we will get to that shortly—they would know what people are saying. They are saying that they want the local services delivered better. Their hope is that the next election will deliver them a government that will pay heed to what they want, where they want it, when they want it, as opposed to this malarky that we get here today.
It is important that we get this right. It is important that we do not just get motherhood statements like “these arrangements are important to protect our amenity, equity and economic sustainability”. The amenity has gone to pot, the equity in the two-class system that Mr Barr has created has gone to pieces and indeed, as to the economic sustainability, yesterday economic sustainability went from a deficit of $36 million to $181 million. I am sure that members would agree that (1)(d) simply needs to be
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