Page 1793 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 2 May 2012
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welfare.” We note the softening in the tone, and I think the business community genuinely welcome the softening of the tone, because they have had so little to welcome in the last 11 years. There has been nothing to celebrate really in terms of business support from this government over the past decade. The record is dreadful and it is exacerbated by the Greens.
I want to use one example. Before the 2008 election a firm called Spark Solo came to all of the parties and said, “We want to be part of this new clean, green economy that you talk about.” The government would give them no assistance because it had gutted the business program so badly in 2006 that there was not a program it could use to offer them any assistance at all to start up. The Greens in their negotiations with us in 2008 said, “Would you support Spark Solo?” We said, yes, we would. I assume they made the same request of the government. And what has happened in the last four years? Nothing in that regard.
I note Ms Le Couteur is going to move an amendment and I will speak to that amendment in some detail later on. The opportunities have been there, but in the last three years and six months nothing has happened. So we get the pat motion from Ms Porter. We understand how this is played: blame those opposite for everything that is wrong; take the credit for anything that you can grab. But nobody is fooled. Nobody is fooled by this document.
Suddenly we have got a government that wants to talk about growth diversification and jobs. Diversification: the word that Mr Barr uses only to ridicule me—because I talk about it at every opportunity I have, because there is so much potential in this place. We saw the private sector grow from 1995 to 2001 as we sought opportunities to move forward and make up for the deficiencies of various federal governments, whether they were Liberal or Labor, that had taken jobs out of the ACT. We grew the private sector. What we have seen is a decline under this crowd as a percentage make-up of jobs in the ACT, and that is a shame. That is an absolute shame. In 2001-02 there were 103,000 private sector jobs in the ACT. In 2002-03 it dropped to 100,000 jobs. It has gone up and down and you can see some of the effect in 2006-07 and 2007-08 where it had climbed up to 106,000. In 2007-08 it went to 105,000. In 2008-09 it dropped to 101,000, in 2009-10 it got up to 104,000 and in 2010-11 it dropped to 99,700.
So what is Andrew Barr’s government’s record of achievement in fostering private sector growth in the ACT? It went backwards, both as a percentage and in real terms. This is all collated from ABS data. In 2001-02 103,000 people worked in the private sector in the ACT. In 2010-11 it was down to 99,700. With a decade of population growth included there, this government managed to go backwards. They have shrunk the private sector.
That is the legacy of Andrew Barr and his colleagues, and no amount of glossy documents and no amount of motions in the Assembly will undo their record. This is the government that got a report in 2008 on how to have a clean, green economy. I forget what it was called; I think it was the sustainable economy or green economy or clean economy. It has had so many names now. But what it has not had is the action that it required and the support of the government. And support is not necessarily financial support; it is moral support, it is leadership, it is commitment.
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