Page 3815 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 29 October 2014
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electorate of working with Kings Swim. Here is a business from out of town that wanted to come to the ACT, make a substantial investment that will see long-term job growth, provide a great community facility and community service and promote a local shopping precinct in my electorate; yet the government stood in the way and wanted to penalise them to the tune of in excess of $300,000 before they could get started.
Another area that we really need to focus on is supporting the local businesses that we have already here. We all talk fairly regularly about growing the base, diversifying the economy and attracting new investment here, which is important, but if you do that at the expense of the people that have already chosen Canberra as the place that they want to live and invest in, you really send some mixed messages.
The research that the Master Builders Association has done suggests, particularly with government procurement on capital, every $1 million that is spent in investment in a local business, particularly in the building industry, returns $2.9 million, almost three times the return, to the local economy. And we see time and again this government putting multinational or national consortia ahead of local builders to do some of our capital investment. I think the courts precinct is a classic example where the shortlist was announced just a couple of weeks ago. The two consortia that have been selected are both multinationals. I understand there was a local bid, but for some reason it was not successful. I look forward to finding out why.
At 6 pm, in accordance with standing order 34, the debate was interrupted. The motion for the adjournment of the Assembly having been put and negatived, the debate was resumed.
MR WALL: Another part of the recipe for improving confidence, the flipside of supporting what we have locally, is encouraging a new employment base. We all talk about the universities here, and Mr Barr even mentions in his amendment that we are educating in excess of 40,000 students, many of whom come from overseas. If we are educating these young people here in our city, instead of the knowledge that we instil in them being our greatest export, perhaps we should be importing the employment base that they are all destined to return to. They are heading to the bigger cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane or overseas, but perhaps we need to be attracting that employment base here to the territory.
We have seen incentives being offered to IKEA, which the Treasurer mentioned. But that is just one example of a very large and, again, multinational company that is going to come here—
Mr Barr: No incentives.
MR WALL: There we go. Not even a concession on rates or land tax? Wow! There must be good profit margins in IKEA.
Encouraging employment as well, in the limited time I have got, is somewhere where government policy is really not hitting the mark. Penalty rates are becoming prohibitive and business owners are working in their business more and more on
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