Page 3816 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 29 October 2014
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weekends and public holidays simply because they cannot afford to put the staff in there. If it was more reasonably priced, they would, in fact, hire the extra staff, but currently as the wage rates stand, they cannot.
One thing to be alarmed about is that Mr Gentleman over there has put out a discussion paper again looking to further increase the number of public holidays that the territory has. I think we will become known as the city for public holidays rather than the best city in the world in which to live.
As I said, there is so much more to be done in this city and so many more opportunities that continue to go unmet. I am happy to continue this discussion time and again, but those opposite continue to pass the blame and point the finger at other places, saying that we are simply too small to have an influence on the way our economy tracks at a local level.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (6.02): It is timely that you would arrive, Madam Speaker, because when Mr Barr started his speech it was almost reminiscent of Ted; I was suddenly seeing Ted Quinlan sitting over there. We got to the question of the economic cycle and, “Ted kindly gave me his economic cycle chart before he left.” We had lots of debates when Mr Quinlan was here, and, of course, when it was good, it was all because of what the government had done and when it was bad, “It’s just the economic cycle.” Surely the role of government is to smooth out that economic cycle, to stop the boom and bust as far as you can to ensure that you minimise the damage and the disruption to economies.
I wish Mr Barr had been at a lunchtime address that Brian Schmidt gave—I think it was at the Business Council—where he said, “Yeah, we live in a great city.” I think we all acknowledge we live in a great city. “The OECD measure, yeah, on certain measures, best, most livable city in the world.” But Brian Schmidt made the point—and this is a Nobel laureate; this is not me—“And so we should be. And so we should be for the base we have come from and the money we spend.” Brian Schmidt made the point that we could be doing so much better. And that is the point of the motion today.
We are criticised. The minister will take the credit when the reports are good, but if somebody criticises him in an effort to try and get things working better and to raise confidence, you are criticised. You have to confront the reality. If you genuinely want to fix some of the problems that are out there—and there are problems out there with confidence—then you have to confront what is driving it. The state of the states report gives you some guide to that, minister.
It is great to have a litany of all the things you do. That is what governments do, particularly Labor governments. They are always good with the litanies of things they do. The great virtue of the Labor Party and Labor governments is that they are good at writing their own history and they can populate it with all the things they have done and all the money that they spend. We have the perfect example with Mr Barr: “I’ve got a $2.4 billion infrastructure spend.” Well, he should read the article in the Canberra Times that said the Mr Fluffy clean-up puts brakes on infrastructure projects. Now, we know that year on year they have had difficulty delivering their
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