Page 2421 - Week 08 - Thursday, 6 June 2013
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And what about arts? $4.7 million was promised for the visual arts hub in Kingston and music arts hub in Ainslie over four years at the last election. But in this budget there is only $1.8 million, for 2013-14 only. What the government fail to highlight in all these underspends is their desperation to make up their promised $29 million surplus in 2015-16 by not putting their promised commitments in the outyears. It is a trick Wayne Swan used. It was exposed. It caught Wayne Swan out. You will be caught out with this urge for a surplus that you cannot deliver when you do not fund your promises consistently and across the period as promised.
But when it comes to green-cred initiatives like the government’s energy efficiency scheme, which already costs Canberrans approximately $1 million a month to run, the government pumps in $1.6 million to expand this initiative. An expanded program that is already expensive to run can only mean one thing to Canberrans: higher taxes, higher rates and higher charges.
When it comes to protecting our tertiary institutions, a core sector of our economy, this government was quite ready to allow its federal Labor counterparts to rip out almost $60 million from this sector, from our economy.
If you look at capital projects, there was the Chief Minister on ABC 666 yesterday morning advising that the city to the lake and the capital metro projects will diversify our economy and create jobs. What she failed to highlight is that the economic softening the government is predicting is actually happening now. The federal Labor government’s job cuts to the public service are actually happening now.
But the commencement of the city to the lake and capital metro projects, according to her, will not begin until well into the second half of this decade. So what is she proposing? What is this government proposing—that people simply go jobless for the next three or four years because this government has failed to plan and failed to deliver?
This is what I mean when I say that the government does not have a plan. Indeed, there have been many critics of the lack of a city plan. We have got development to the north-east and now we are going to the south-west. But if you stretch a doughnut, the doughnut breaks. This government has had 12 years in which to deliver a plan for the entire city centre and has failed to do so. This is the height of this government’s contempt for taxpayers.
Let us look at capital metro. There can be no better example of their contempt for the people of this city than the capital metro initiative. In this government’s race to be—what was it?—the most progressive, capital metro is the jewel of the ACT Labor-Greens alliance. In fact, so much so that the Treasurer unequivocally stated that this project will go ahead whatever the cost.
In fact, he even added that there is no number at which the project will not go ahead. This Assembly might recall that capital metro was promised $34 million in the last election. But we see in this budget that it is an $18.7 million project. Again, according
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