Page 1779 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 4 June 2014
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place is that the boom and bust cycle of the economy is often felt most harshly here in the ACT. Now that we have had Mr Corbell’s revelation that both federal governments have dudded the ACT, there really is a question about how we address the cycle and minimise the impact of the fiscal ups and downs of the Federation. And can we actually have a truly transformational approach to the future of the ACT rather than simply saying, “We’re building some big capital works and they’ll transform the economy and the town”?
It is without a doubt a one-horse town. This is a city that depends on public service, on government expenditure, and, to a large extent, the majority of the private sector is dependent on that expenditure. The Federation gets a cold, the commonwealth gets a cold—or it has a sneeze, and we get a cold.
With respect to carving our own path, it was interesting to hear Mr Barr say the other day that, out of adversity, you have opportunity, or you have to make opportunities for yourself. There really is a need for a discussion about what sort of opportunity we want.
I think the problem for the government is that it is well and good to announce a string of capital works, none of which appear to be truly funded, none of which are shovel-ready, and which in many ways will simply shuffle the pieces on the shuffleboard rather than building a genuinely independent economy over which we have much greater control. And if we are to have much greater control of our future and ameliorate the impact on ordinary Canberrans of the ups and downs of the commonwealth, the only genuine way to do it is to build a private sector economy.
In 1995, when Kate Carnell and the Canberra Liberals came to office, public sector employment was about 60 per cent of the economy. When we left office in 2001, it was 40 per cent. What we did, though, was grow the private sector to take up the slack. And it was pleasing to hear the Chief Minister say that one of the first things she was doing after the federal budget was to talk to Kate Carnell about what she had done. I think Kate’s answer to that was, “The first thing I did was I didn’t talk down the city.” Unfortunately, there has been a bit of talking down of the city as the government postures and positions itself for its budget, and that really does not help anyone—least of all the government, I suspect.
The point of this motion is to say that if we are to become masters of our own fate, as it were, the only way we can do it is to have sources of income other than the commonwealth, and the only place those sources of income will come from is the private sector. So in part (1)(a) I note:
(a) in 2001, 60% of employment in the ACT was from the private sector.
One can see the foundation that the current government inherited through a number of things—that 60 per cent private sector, the introduction of the GST, the regrowth of the public service under the Howard-Costello years, as well as the building of a number of cultural icons for the territory and to service the people of Australia, and the expansion of other cultural icons.
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