Page 2338 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 12 August 2014
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Again, the estimates recommendation was to review the application of some of these things. “No, we have already done that. We are not reopening that little Pandora’s box.” And then of course the changes to the land tax that the government proposes will make things even worse.
Look at this government in relation to where they see the economy. Again, as Mr Coe just said, this is a city where its property sector is incredibly important as we still grow and become a city with a lot of potential. But there are now something like 10 development fronts this government believe are necessary to fuel its insatiable hunger for revenue from the land and property sector because they have not properly diversified the ACT economy.
We have got Gungahlin, Molonglo, city to the lake, the city plan, the city to Gungahlin corridor. Riverview is coming online. There is talk of the next stages of Kingston foreshore. There is, of course, the Yarralumla brickworks. Throw into it possibly going across the Murrumbidgee at Tuggeranong. We have got Lawson and Moncrieff about to come on line. And then, of course, throw in diversification. It is well and good to have all these plans, but then you have got to run a light rail down Northbourne Avenue that will steal all the jobs from these other areas because they will shift there.
What happens? You get a dysfunctional city. And if we have got a dysfunctional city, we have got problems. Forget about the city-state notion of the ACT; we are simply a city. The city is our home; it is our future; it is our economy. And if we do not make it work, it will be a very poor home. It will fail as an economy and we will not have a future. We need to be city builders if we are to look after the people of the ACT properly.
There is no city building plan in this document. I simply again refer to Mr Corbell’s failed plan from eight years ago—16 key initiatives, not one of which went even close to starting, let alone completion. And yet all we get from the government is, “The detail is in the document.” The detail is not in the document. The temporary deficits are in the document, which is the denial by the Treasurer of the true state of what is happening here. We have a denial from those opposite of the true potential of the private sector in the ACT. We have got their document where they finally use the diversification word but it is a rehash, a rebrand, a rename, a reorganisation or a refund of things that were primarily there or had been there and had been canned by this government. So that is the dilemma of this budget.
When we look at property vacancy rates and the effect that the great, big government office building will have, this is a government that has an obligation to all of its citizens, including those who invest in the property market in the ACT, to get it right, not to cut a deal with the unions and perhaps the union super fund so that they can have a building of their own in the city with a long-term revenue stream courtesy of the ACT taxpayer. I think we have got to get the balance there. Of course we want new development and we want the growth in the city to occur but you just cannot shift the point from one side of the city to another and back again. It was on the east side. Then it was the west side. Then it was city to the lake. Now it is City Hill. Now it is
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