Page 1405 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 13 May 2014
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Tuggeranong fire station, and there are many other smaller projects I have not mentioned.
It is vital to maintain high levels of employment. It is one of the keys to maintaining the health of our community and it will remain a core priority of the ACT government through 2014. It is a core value of a Labor parliamentarian. However, I am under no misconceptions about our ability to compensate for the decisions of the federal Treasurer. We are exposed to a number of risks.
The commonwealth’s ACT workforce is three times the size of our own and we cannot absorb large redundancies. Our GST revenue continues to decline relative to the services it is supposed to pay for and further cuts will hurt. Direct funding for vital reforms and community services, if cut, would undermine hard-won gains for our schools and some of our most vulnerable people. The ACT budget, as nine per cent of the territory economy, can respond to federal belt tightening, but not to savage austerity.
Leadership is about having vision, about having foresight, but also about making decisions to prioritise and focus our effort to ensure that we are leading the Canberra community competently into the future. This government is one which not only has vision through forward-looking policies and transformational projects but also that determines action to progress our vision and is responsible for these actions through reporting back to the community. This government has demonstrated a strong track record in financial and economic leadership.
Our fiscal discipline has supported the ACT’s strong economy and has enabled the government to meet its people’s needs. We have invested in priority areas—our public schools, our hospitals and our infrastructure. Our program of capital investments continues to support the economy and expand the productive capacity of our economy for the long term and provide confidence, stability and leadership to the private sector. We continue to work to improve services and community facilities to ensure that our city is a good and safe place to live.
Strong government leadership is required to drive the community, business and regional linkages needed to continue to create a prosperous future through the provision of infrastructure for the ACT. The government is committed to listening to the community in shaping the future of our city, providing very tangible mechanisms for that to happen and building that output into both our short-term responses and our long-term strategic planning. I welcome the opportunity to highlight this leadership and experience and the forward-looking policies of this government.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (4.08): I thank Ms Porter for bringing on this MPI today. It is an important issue. The delivery of infrastructure is not something at which this government has shone. You only have to go back to some of the Auditor-General’s reports where she has been incredibly critical of the way that this government delivers infrastructure. Indeed, from one of the recent financial reports:
The significant underspend mainly resulted from delays in procurement for various capital works projects because it took longer than expected to scope the
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