Page 1395 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 March 2012
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This government, ACT Labor, with their Greens alliance partners, have sought to impose more pressures. They have said, “Canberrans can bear it because their incomes are higher than the national average.” Their incomes may be higher, but the costs are also much higher. Canberra families can only bear so much. And there are many families whose incomes are not that much higher, whose incomes are very modest indeed. There are tens of thousands of families who live on very modest incomes in Canberra. And even those who are on relatively good incomes are being forced. If they have bought a house in the last few years, the mortgage is likely to be $350,000 to $400,000 plus. That is a lot of repayments. When the electricity price keeps going up and you add another $200 to that, and when the water goes up, you feel that more than you may have if your mortgage was half that amount.
All of these things are linked. We have seen, unfortunately, a government that do not care about these issues. They think that the people of Canberra can just bear it. We take a different view. We believe that all of their policies should go towards making things more affordable. There should be always a consideration: who will pay for this? How much will it cost? How can we deliver it more efficiently so that we reduce those costs? How can we govern more efficiently so that instead of constantly jacking up taxes and charges we can occasionally lower those or even keep them steady for a period of time so that in real terms people are better off?
This is what a good government would have been doing. But for the last decade ACT Labor have just been imposing cost burden upon cost burden for Canberra families. At the same time, they are taking so much more in tax. They are now taking more than double the revenue that they took when they first came in. They have not delivered on local services. On the one hand, people are paying more; on the other hand, they are getting less. Whether it is in relation to our hospitals, our roads network, the delivery of infrastructure or land development, people are getting less of a service from the ACT Labor government.
This bill is important. It will not in and of itself fix these issues, but it will be a very important accountability measure saying that a government should have to put it all on the table. The government should have to put on the table what their policies and their budget mean to Canberra families.
I commend Mr Smyth on this. Mr Smyth, along with his Liberal Party colleagues, has taken this issue seriously. He has not just come in in an election year, like Labor has, and said that we should start caring a bit, or pretending to care, about cost of living pressures. Cost of living pressures are there, and people understand that Labor inherently puts them up—Labor’s inability to control its budget and Labor’s fetish for policies which cost large amounts with little benefit, as we have seen with many schemes right across the country. It is becoming part of the Labor Party’s DNA—at a state level, at a territory level, at a federal level—to put costs up. It always raises taxes. It always mismanages programs.
It is families right across the nation, in this case here in Canberra, who pay for that. We have seen that right across the country. That is a large part of the reason why so many Labor governments are being punished—because they just do not get it. They
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