Page 3998 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 25 November 2014
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are good at and this is the reputation we are building on and make sure we present the opportunities and provide support for those that take the risk to join the ranks of the 24,377 businesses that currently exist as listed in the stats.
But that does not come about by paying lip-service to business in the ACT; it comes about through genuine dialogue with them, listening to them and delivering what they want. The problem with this government—and we hear it constantly and we saw it again this morning in the gambling red tape reduction bill—is that there is this sudden urge to get rid of all the red tape that this government has put in place over the last 13 years. We are getting such tiny increments of change to things that people on this side of the house have been complaining about for years and will continue to bring to the attention of the government.
We saw the disastrous budget of 2006 where just about all the business assistance the government offered disappeared, and we have seen since 2006 that it has been slowly all put back in place because they realised the damage they had done. But most of what the government has done is simply to rename or rebrand or rehash or relaunch things that used to exist—many of them going back to the former Liberal government, and even before that, going back to the former Follett governments—that were so disastrously destroyed. You can see that that has had an impact on confidence, and so much that drives the business sector is, indeed, confidence. It is that old line: nothing to fear but fear itself.
We need the government to go beyond the lip-service that I and most people out there believe the government pays. It is important that we have a framework that starts with an aspiration. It is about saying, “Yes, we can grow the business sector.” We know when the Liberal Party came to office in 95 that private sector employment in this town was at 40 per cent; when they left it was 60 per cent. We now know it is back down to about fifty-fifty, and that is the problem. We have a government that does not have a vision for the financial independence of this territory. You only have to go to, I think it is, page 42 of budget paper 3, where the Treasurer says the deficits are temporary—it will all come back when the government starts spending again. If you have that sort of attitude, then things are not going to change.
There is a great deal of potential out there, and a number of businesses are doing well. Let us face it, the great names—whether it be TOWER Software, whether it be CEA Technologies, whether it be Aspen Medical—all started with an individual or two individuals getting together and saying, “I’ve got this idea.” A moment of enlightenment where the light bulb goes on and they say, “Let’s give it a go.” But what we have to have is a situation where those people know that the support is there, and there all the time, that the framework of regulation, taxation and business infrastructure, for instance, is there to enable them to put their product on display, test their product to get their product to market and that they have the support of their government—not just when it suits the government when there is a low point but all the time.
If we truly want a more sustainable city and a city where we are able to fund improvements in the wellbeing of all its citizens, we need other revenue sources beyond the Treasurer’s insistence that the good times will come back when the federal
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