Page 1780 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 4 June 2014
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It is interesting that in 1913, at the unveiling of the commemorative stone and the naming of Canberra, following on from Burley-Griffin’s fabulous words, “Let’s build an ideal city,” Prime Minister Fisher said that it needed to be a city of “government, education and the arts”. I think we have concentrated very much on government, and I think we all appreciate education—we certainly did when we were last in office, and to their credit this government has also concentrated on it—but there is that third element called the arts. The arts are big drivers in creative economies, through design, through the museum sector and through the cultural pursuits that make cities attractive to people. It is about time that we looked at that.
Part (1)(b) is a summary:
(a) the … Government’s position over the last five Budgets that the greatest risk to the ACT economy is a Commonwealth Government downturn.
Who would have thought? But there it is in black and white. But what we have not seen is a strategy in the last five years to genuinely diversify the ACT economy, to say that the private sector is not some sort of bulwark that we turn to when the economy goes a bit sour because the commonwealth has cut spending. Why don’t we genuinely increase the size of the private sector so that we ameliorate the impacts?
Parts (1)(c) and (d) note that, in the ACT budget review given to the public accounts committee, there is the comment that we are exposed because we have not diversified. I quote:
Due to the impact of this sector—
it is talking about the commonwealth fiscal consolidation, the chosen words of Mr Barr—
on other sectors and due to the lack of diversification in the ACT economy, this may also affect private sector hiring intentions.
There it is laid out by CIE, the independent adviser to the PAC, that we have not done the job. And it really is important that we now set ourselves a target.
As I said, when Kate Carnell came to office in 1995 it was 60-40. They turned that around in five short years to 40-60, and I am suggesting today that that might not be an unreasonable target, in order to start a conversation, a discussion, about what sort of transformation could genuinely occur in the ACT over the next couple of years.
Part (1)(e) refers to the decline in private sector employment over the last 13 years. It may have gone up in raw numbers but as a percentage of the economy it has gone down. We on this side believe that a number of things have affected that, but there are a number of analyses now. Indeed there is one that appears to have come out today from the frontier centre, which have released their first annual entrepreneurial index. This has looked at which jurisdictions—and they have looked at Canada, New Zealand and Australia—really have in place policies that help to create entrepreneurs. There are a number of measures which look at various things, and then they give a score.
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