Page 1619 - Week 05 - Thursday, 15 May 2014
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that about Liberal cuts. None of us like it. But the problem for us is that we have a government that do not understand that as long as we are, as they term it, a government town, that is what will always happen.
Indeed, in the statement from the Chief Minister, Canberra will always be known as a government town. Well, only if we let it and only if we can continue to not diversify the economy in a genuine way, and only if we do not build the sort of infrastructure that supports the private sector—things like convention centres, which apparently the government is not responsible for now and has no ownership of, according to the debate yesterday. We will languish—(Time expired.)
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo—Minister for Territory and Municipal Services, Minister for Corrections, Minister for Housing, Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs and Minister for Ageing) (4.42): I thank Dr Bourke for raising this topic for discussion today. The federal budget will have a significant deleterious impact on jobs, services, the community and business across Australia and it will have a particularly hard impact on the ACT. In my portfolio areas alone, I can foresee entrenchment of disadvantage. Given that the ACT is the place of the national capital, we in Canberra are particularly vulnerable to a national government that wants to run away from national responsibility by espousing smaller government. In reality, the model of smaller government means smaller vision, smaller minds and I think a smaller spirit of heart.
The attack in this budget—I think we do have to call it an attack, because that is what it is—on young people, I believe, is particularly heartless. At a time when unemployment is increasing and in a budget which offers little or nothing for significant jobs growth, the federal government has decided to reduce support for young people. Under the three-word slogan, “Learning or earning” the federal budget includes that people under 25 will get youth allowance, not Newstart. This is a significant reduction and is not an adequate living allowance for young people. In turn, this will put additional pressures on services provided by state and territory governments, particularly in housing and welfare services. I will come back to this topic.
I hope that all members today are prepared to work together in the coming months and years as those doing it tough start doing it even tougher. I also expect additional pressures on our corrections system, especially given the cuts to legal aid, which I spoke of in the Assembly yesterday. As I have said, the ACT government now has to look at what steps we can take to try and offset some of these impacts on our community.
We have significant job losses to come, as the federal government reduces the public service. I might note here that Mr Smyth has made some remarks about my comments on that. I think the Greens have been fairly consistent in saying that we think the public service is important. Any ideological approach to slashing it and lazy slogans, whether it be Kevin Rudd’s meat axe, Joe Hockey’s references or whatever—wherever they come from—do little to really recognise the fact that the public service delivers services for Australia, for all members of our community.
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