Page 1661 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 7 May 2013
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ago when Mr Rattenbury, in the morning, was calling elements of this ACTEW fiasco “obscene”? Was that the right word? It was obscene; and it was Shane Rattenbury to the rescue! “I’m going to do something about this; it’s obscene.” He eventually came in here. We can all imagine the conversations that happened behind closed doors: “Mate, remember your railway set that we’re going to build you, the train set, the light rail system? Remember all the staff that you’ve got in your office? Mate, you’ve done pretty well. You don’t need to go us. Don’t support the opposition here. The public don’t really care about this whole ACTEW business.” We saw Shane Rattenbury come meekly into the chamber. After it being outrageous and obscene in the morning, he then said, “No, nothing to see here. There’re a number of reviews. We’ll just let those go on.” Having regard to this whole talk about third-party insurance and this illusion that the Greens were going to hold this government to account in any way, we have, I think, seen the reality of what is happening there.
Let me turn now to the budget breakfast and make the point quite clearly that what the government have done is hold a gun to the Business Council’s head. They have said to them, “If the opposition attend that breakfast,” as they have done for the last 17 years, whether it be Liberal or Labor, “we will not attend.” With respect to the premier event for the Canberra Business Council, and a very important event for the business community and for the Business Council—a fundraiser for them and a way that they get information out to their members—Andrew Barr has basically gone to them and said, “If you invite the opposition to do the opposition’s job, we’re going to walk away from that breakfast and the whole thing’s going to fall over.”
I think that is an absolutely outrageous thing for this government to have done, on a number of levels. It shows enormous disrespect to the business community and to the Business Council. It also shows enormous disrespect to the community because the budget is a community document. The government delivers it but it is the community’s money, it is the ratepayers’ money, it is our money. The government are delivering on our behalf, on the community’s behalf. For the government to decide that what they are going to do is basically threaten the Business Council to collapse that event after 17 years so that they can avoid scrutiny is disgraceful.
Mr Seselja pointed to a couple of possible reasons. Firstly, what is in this budget? What is it that they want to hide? Maybe it is pretty bad, and I guess we will have to find out. The second point is that the reality is that the government have been made to look ridiculous at that business event over the last three or four years.
Probably the highlight for me was the office building. Remember the government office building? Remember that one? This was the death star; we were going to have the death star. Remember the floating walkway—the views of the arboretum from the walkway? It was going to be just fantastic! And they had to have it. It was going to save the community millions of dollars. If it was not for Zed Seselja and Brendan Smyth pointing out what a ridiculous notion it was and exposing the fact that the cost-benefit analysis was on an A4 piece of paper in 16 font, if the Canberra Liberals had not exposed that, we would probably have it starting to be built out in the car park right now, wasting $400 million of taxpayers’ money. We wasted $5 million on the scoping work. We have already wasted $5 million.
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