Page 981 - Week 03 - Thursday, 28 February 2013
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
to. We will do it because we understand the effect. And if you want to be partisan, then be partisan. But you will not get our support for that approach. What we will do is what we always do: stand up for jobs in the ACT.
Ms Berry also did not tell the full story when it came to payroll tax. Of course the thresholds were put in place by the then Liberal government and after a 10-year hiatus, local Labor suddenly decided they needed to do something to payroll tax before the last election. We had a program in place that was to see the threshold rise by a quarter of a million dollars every year, but it did not happen because just before the 2002 budget, the then Treasurer Ted Quinlan canned it. Just days before people expected some relief, it got canned. So after a 10-year hiatus, welcome back to the tax reform field. But like most of your tax reforms over the last 11 years, your tax initiatives have failed. Payroll tax is something that you are behind again on.
Ms Berry also talked about the government programs to assist business. Again, it was a new member’s mistake. What happened in 2006? They all got gutted and a large number of the staff of Business ACT lost their jobs. There were no programs for a number of years. Here we were creating the brave new world. We shut 23 schools and we shut down the business programs. Education, everybody agrees, is the future but Mr Barr, the Edward Scissorhands of the ACT Assembly, was over there closing schools. It is curious that we are now building demountables at Duffy because they closed Weston primary.
But what you also did was shut down all the programs. Ms Berry talked about bringing innovative and sustainable industries to the ACT. I mention to her the words “Spark Solar”. Spark Solar were a local firm. They set up in the ACT to be close to the ANU because of the world groundbreaking research being done there so that they could potentially build a facility here. Blue-collar workers, semiskilled workers would have got a job if this had gone ahead.
The Greens agreed before the 2008 election to support Spark Solar, the Liberal Party agreed to support Spark Solar, the Labor Party could not do anything because they had killed all the programs. They actually did not have a program to help this firm set up in the ACT because they had got rid of all the programs. I note that since 2008 the Greens-Labor government still could not find a way to assist a firm like Spark Solar set up a manufacturing plant in the ACT—blue-collar jobs, semiskilled jobs in the ACT. They went begging as well, Ms Berry.
So when you get up here and you want to preach and you read the spiel that you are given, then you should make sure of your facts. We gutted the programs. We gutted the programs in 2006. If I remember rightly, that was to set us up for the future. It still has not set us up for the future. We are still chasing that elusive surplus. The Treasurer is looking more and more like his pinup boy Wayne Swan every day. We have got surpluses that never appear, taxes that do not gather what was promised and nothing but continual promises from a government that does not deliver.
Mr Barr: You are going the other way from Joe Hockey, are you?
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video