Page 802 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 27 February 2013
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constraints and are deliverable. Those on the other side are far more concerned with rolling out an ideological agenda that is at the extremes of the debate—to be, as Shane Rattenbury said, the most progressive, the most green, government in Australia.
The Chief Minister in her comments made a point about the votes and where the vote went. Let us be very clear about what happened at the election. The Labor Party and the Liberal Party got eight seats all. We actually beat the Labor Party on the popular vote. There were eight seats all. Then there was a choice. There was a choice for Mr Rattenbury to make in terms of which side he went with. We stood by what we had said in the election campaign. Mr Seselja, in those negotiations, stood by his values and stood committed to what we had been saying, which was about sound economic management and delivery of good local services to Canberrans. He did not step away from that.
What the government did and, in particular, what Katy Gallagher did was to basically say, “I’ll do what you want, Shane. I’ll give you a million dollar office. I will sign up to any target that you set. I will join you in being the most extreme green, the most extreme left, jurisdiction in Australia if that’s what it takes to secure government.” Not surprisingly, Mr Rattenbury is pretty true to his ideology. He is at the extreme of the Green left progressive movement. We understand that; that is where he sits. He is pretty happy. He has two options. Does he go with the Liberals, who have been consistent in their values and consistent in what they said to the people at the election or, having seen the eradication of three of the four Greens, does he go with the government, who have been saying certain things during the campaign and who have been talking about good local services, despite the lack of that over the last 12 years? Katy Gallagher basically promised him that blank cheque that we refused to sign. We refused to give Shane Rattenbury a blank cheque and the government agreed to it. The reality is that we have ended up in a position now where they seem to be, as a government, rolling out an agenda that is going to be very damaging in the long term to Canberra.
We on this side support sustainable growth. We do want to see Canberra grow. We do want to see it vibrant. We do want to see it develop towards the city that it can be. But we do not want to do it at any cost. We are not going to stand here and say, “We’ll just write blank cheques now to satisfy our ideology in this place that our children, our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren will be paying off for decades.” We have seen that at the federal level. We have now seen Andrew Barr, out of the Wayne Swan economic playbook, when questioned in estimates by Mr Smyth with regard to just one element of the negotiations between the Greens and the Labor Party, say, “Yes, we’ve got a figure of $630 million”—which I think we would all struggle to believe based on the way the cost estimates by this group go—“Yes, it’s $640 million, but I will deliver this. This government will deliver this at any cost.”
This is the difference in approach. Government is about priorities; government is about setting targets. Mr Rattenbury and others have said, “Your government set targets, so you were extreme as well.” Government does set targets, federally and locally, in other jurisdictions. The problem is not the setting of the targets. It is what those targets are. If you set a target for renewable energy, that is fine. But if you decide to set a target of 90 per cent, that is a problem. If you set a target for carbon
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