Page 3997 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 25 November 2014
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service to the federal government, which we all know has the dilemma of the endless cycle of ups and downs of federal government—Labor governments spending big and creating debt; Liberal governments coming in and cleaning up the mess—which we have seen so many times in the last couple of decades.
Government members interjecting—
MR SMYTH: You can groan over on that side, but it is the truth.
Mr Wall: Have a look at the latest ABS stats.
MR SMYTH: That is quite right; just have a look at the stats. One of the ways to ameliorate some of those impacts is to lift the relativity from 1.2 to 1.6 per cent so that we get the relativity we see in the other states.
It is interesting that when you look at the service sector you can see some start to that happening in the ACT. But it is about asking what sort of city we want to live in. Andrew Fisher, when the foundation stone was laid, said that this should be a city of governance, a city of education, and a city of the arts. For instance, when Washington was founded in the 1790s the founding fathers said they saw Washington—almost identical words—as a city of governance, a city of education, a city of arts, but they also said a city of commerce. Indeed, I think Canberra could add that to Fisher’s original quote.
Let us work through it. The government, as we know, is a staple; it provides half the employment in the territory. It is our primary function, and servicing that government is something the private sector, I am sure, love to do. They would like some more certainty, and we need to ensure that, when the federal government is not spending, there are other opportunities there.
In terms of education, I think we are all coming to appreciate how successful our local education institutions are and what a big market is out there. For instance, I am told that Indonesia will have to educate millions of new teachers over the next decade to support their population. There is an opportunity for the education facilities in the ACT that train teachers to ensure we cash in on that. But it is beyond that. If we go beyond education we get to the arts. It is quite clear that the arts are drivers of economies, they are drivers of creativity, they help create wealth, and they are the basis of the creative industries. I think the arts in the ACT are currently well and truly underdone and are not being served well by this government and particularly by this minister.
Berlin, for instance, has its University of the Arts which goes well beyond the traditional fine arts, performing arts and visual arts and includes things like design and architecture because it sees them as important drivers of the future. A number of the universities of the arts around the world do that.
When we get to addressing that difference between 1.2 per cent of the total number of businesses in the country and 1.6 per cent of the total number of population, we certainly need to have the environment that allows us to say these are the things we
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