Page 1920 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 14 May 2013
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
still have is the government being on target for a record deficit of $362,940,000, which is not modified, of course, since the mid-year review.
When you look at the reason for this, of course the minister trots out the Abbott government. Apparently the spectre of an Abbott government has now been affecting the ACT economy since about 2010. No doubt it will go on for as long as the minister can milk it. He talked of fiscal consolidation to seemingly portray the economic management of the federal budget by federal Labor and to indicate that somehow they have got it all under control. He blames potential public service losses under an Abbott government but fails to acknowledge that even as late as yesterday, $580 million was ripped out of the federal public service appropriation by the Gillard-Rudd government without any acknowledgement that a single job will be lost from that. This is cloud-cuckoo-land stuff and at best it is just disingenuous. At worst, the Treasurer can live with the consequences himself.
What we do know, though, is that jobs are being cut. We all saw that Canberra Times headline earlier in the week where something like 3,000 jobs went last year. We do not know what has gone in the first quarter of this year, but we do know that the $580 million wind-back that has been occurring surreptitiously under federal Labor, and Gillard and Swan in particular, is genuinely affecting the ACT. If there is a loss of revenues through conveyancing or the lease variation charge, it is because of federal Labor and their mismanagement and the complicit actions of this government in not standing up to them.
We note again that conveyancing is down. It is down by some $30 million. The much vaunted lease variation charge is still $7 million shy of its target for three quarters of the year. Indeed, at the half year it was also $7 million shy of the target. This is a tax that is not delivering. This is a tax that is in fact exacerbating the very conditions that the minister describes in terms of a softening of the market and the impact of federal budget cuts. It is time the minister admitted that his tax is having a dampening effect on the economy.
To simply say that it is Tony Abbott’s fault I think is just simplistic. I think people are sick of it. They are sick of government, and particularly ministers and particularly treasurers, not taking responsibility for their management. This is Treasurer Barr’s tax. This is ACT Labor’s tax. It is a tax on everything they say they want to happen in the city. They want to move to 50 per cent of development being in the urban existing areas, not in greenfield areas. Yet this is a tax on infill.
They say they want more people living in the town centres. Yet this is a tax on town centre development. They say they want to increase the density per square hectare, but this is a tax on that sort of development. In fact, it is a tax on the environment, because what it does is it forces greenfields development. It forces people to move further and further out. We have now got a city called Canberra that covers probably the same area as, say, Hornsby to Cronulla does, with a twentieth of the population.
For all the talk of the Green-Labor alliance across the way there and about sustainability, this is a tax on sustainability and you are reaping the dividend. You are getting what you sow, which is people baulking at development. Developers tell us all
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video