Page 3091 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 14 August 2012
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Indeed, Shelter went on to say:
From what I understand, for instance, the stamp duty concessions are only available if you purchase new dwellings. A lot of the cheaper properties are not new dwellings. So there is going to be no advantage in that.
Their assessment of the reforms is that even more people will be squeezed out of the housing market by a government that for a decade has not been able to deliver land and housing in this jurisdiction at an affordable level. When you get words from groups like Shelter, ACTCOSS, the Youth Coalition and the elected body in that regard then there is a serious problem in this territory and that serious problem is the Labor government.
We go to the dissenting report. The dissenting report really is a report card on the last 11 years. Basically, what the report card says is that the government should be condemned for a number of things. Those things are their inability or their failure to implement sound fiscal policy, their failure to reduce cost of living pressure on Canberra families and households, their failure to exercise sound effective and efficient management of the ACT’s health system, their failure to protect all children in the care of the territory, their failure to eliminate bullying in the ACT public service, schools and other places, their failure to manage the capital works program effectively and efficiently and their failure to implement sound, equitable, and efficient tax reform.
It is interesting that the committee did not recommend that the budget be passed. I think what the 2012-13 budget represents is the failure on the part of the ACT Labor government and the Labor-Greens alliance to truly deliver anything worth while in the last four years for the people of the ACT. We know that the alliance over the last four years, according to the Commissioner for the Environment, has seen the ACT environment go backwards. Who would have thought that—that a Greens-Labor government would rule over a decline in the standard of our natural environment? That is what they have done. It goes along with bullying, failure to deliver health, failure to deliver affordable housing, failure to deliver balanced budgets, failure to diversify the ACT and failure to genuinely serve the people of the ACT. (Time expired)
MR COE (Ginninderra) (11.45): Firstly I would like to thank my fellow members of the Select Committee on Estimates, Ms Bresnan, Mr Hargreaves, Ms Hunter and my colleague Mr Smyth. Special thanks must also go to Ms Salvaneschi, the committee secretary, for her diligence and commitment throughout the estimates process. The role of the committee secretary during an inquiry into an appropriation bill must be one of the hardest jobs for any committee secretary, so a special thanks and acknowledgement must go to Ms Salvaneschi for the work she did. I know there was much support provided by her colleagues so my thanks go to the other members of the Committee Office too.
During the two weeks of hearings the committee heard from a large number of witnesses and I want to put on the record my thanks to the members of community organisations and department officials for their time and commitment to the process.
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