Page 450 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 18 March 2014
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This package that the government has dropped clearly says that Mr Barr got it wrong. The then Treasurer, Katy Gallagher, got it wrong, and Mr Barr has got it wrong. This is not the perfect tax. It does have an effect. It has hindered development. It has slowed the economy. It has hurt the building industry. It has stopped job creation. And it has stopped the building of infrastructure, or slowed down the building of infrastructure and other projects, that would have helped the economy.
Of course, we hear, “We’re building the Majura parkway.” When I had the last briefing on the Majura parkway as minister, it was going to cost $145 million and it was to follow on from our successful roads program, which this government took a lot longer to deliver and which cost a lot more money. Here we are, more than a decade after that, and it is costing more than double that amount. And that is the problem with this government. They promise, and they cannot deliver. Now we know that, instead of stimulating the economy, there is no certainty with this stimulus package, according to the Chief Minister—she “hopes” that it does stimulate. What is the point of that?
The other thing is that, having taken away the lease variation charge and watered down the extension of time on commence and complete fees, it will actually take the business community time to crank up those projects. They have been asking for these charges to be removed for years. And it is only at a minute to midnight, when things are getting particularly scary for the government, because they know they have got it wrong, because they have got a history of not helping business, that they suddenly leap into the fray, clearly unprepared, with absolutely no analysis of whether it will work or not.
This builds on some of the other monumental decisions taken against business in this territory when, in 2006, all of the business programs were cut out of the budget, and the tourism budget was cut by a quarter. It has taken almost eight years for tourism to get those numbers back up. Last year, the centenary year, it took a mammoth injection, $32 million, to get it back up to the 2003 levels.
The question is: will it hold? I do not see anything in the documentation or any of the preparation from the government that shows they have actually prepared for the year after. They have simply done the job and said, “We had a great centenary year, everything will be hunky-dory afterwards.” Well, we will see. But the problem is that, with respect to this government, through cutting programs and funding and sending out the message that they really did not care about business in 2006, it has taken a long time to build that back up. They are slowly replacing the programs and they are gradually upping the budgets, but it takes time to get an economy to work properly again, and it takes time to get confidence. It takes time to get those people who have left the territory and taken their business elsewhere to come back and to trust this government. All of this comes at a time when the government is now its own land developer of choice, squeezing the private sector out even further from the ability to develop greenfield sites.
It is a timely motion. Thank you, Dr Bourke; you have finally got something right—a motion of relevance. The importance of building momentum in the ACT and
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