Page 1802 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 2 May 2012
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recent ABS data shows a record number of Canberrans in employment—206,400 of them. That is a fantastic achievement for this economy. It is the largest number of people in employment in the history of the territory. We have very sound building blocks for the future. The ACT can and will through this strategy be positioned as a forward looking, innovative and creative city, something I would hope all members of this chamber would support, and that they will get behind this strategy as we move into our second century as a city.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (12.27): It is hard not to support the amendment. With some of the words such as “green businesses”, you only need to go back to 1997 and the creating our future ACT industry development plan of the then Liberal government to see that there was a whole area on environmental industries and exporting sustainability. The Liberal Party has been interested in and worked towards this for a very long time. If you go to some of the documents from no waste by 2010—a wonderful program totally abandoned by the current Labor government, ably supported by the Greens, because they certainly did not go into bat to keep no waste by 2010 as a target—they quite specifically say you will get to a point where there are items in the waste stream that currently have no way of being recycled or reused and that this will spawn new industries to take care of those, because if we have the problem in the ACT then it is a problem that exists in other jurisdictions. Of course, that all went by the by. Look, they are nice words. They have been in documents from the Liberal Party for nigh on 17-odd years. So it is good to see everybody is catching up in that regard.
It is interesting that Mr Barr talks about our second century. One of the things he forgot to mention, of course, was the August 2008 document from his government called Capital development: towards our second century. It is funny when you cast back into these documents. This one states:
The economic component of this policy framework is Capital Development, which supersedes the EconomicWhite Paper.
Capital Development is a strategic plan. It sets out the broad objectives, priorities and themes to guide our economic policies into the future.
It says there are a number of plans that will underpin this, and fundamental to it is a business and industry action plan which will further develop strategies and actions to encourage a stronger, more innovative and globally competitive business sector.
Three years it took the government to come up with their business and industry action plan. Three years of neglect; three years of lost opportunity; three years of waste; three years in which they could have been building up all the things that Mr Barr so glibly talks about now. Chris Faulks got it quite right when she said, “We want the detail.” I agree with you, Ms Le Couteur; we want the detail, but the problem for this government is that it is a sham government. It puts out documents that are never honoured or never completed.
Indeed, I was reminded of a comment when Mr Barr was speaking when he said, “We want to make it easier for business.” If you cast your mind back to a couple of
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