Page 3051 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 16 September 2015
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MADAM SPEAKER: Mr Barr, come to order.
MR SMYTH: I will go back to the 1995-2001 government of Kate Carnell and the government of the day went after IT and ICT. It is why we were successful and why we were very keen to get NICTA. We got NICTA for the ACT, something the government seems to take a lot of credit for without acknowledging how it got here. You only have to look at Epicor where the ACT government of the day, in cooperation with I think it was the University of New South Wales, got the bulk of the funding and set up Epicor in the ACT, courtesy of the Howard government.
That is the basis of a lot of this activity. Obviously things happened before that. The fact we have the ANU, UC and such a huge concentration of the CSIRO and the researchers here that spinoff all the time, you would expect this, and we welcome it. We welcome that entrepreneurial spirit because we supported it consistently in our time in government, unlike those opposite who gutted their budget and said the easy hit is to knock off business support programs, and they struggled for years to recover.
The government do not listen to business, and I go back to what the motion calls on—that is, to ensure:
Canberra’s business environment remains competitive and attractive for local and interstate and international business by implementing the Confident and Business Ready strategy;
The confident & business ready strategy was just the reimplementation, the rehash, the renewal, the rename, the relaunch, the rebadge of projects, some of which had started in the Follett government years. They were well and truly producing excellence in the Carnell years and were gutted just after this man joined the cabinet. Totally gutted! The motion calls on the government to continue to:
work with employers, local businesses, unions and the community to continue to create and support local jobs.
Listen to the entirety of the community. The Canberra Business Chamber’s document shows that 54 of the leading institutions that cover most of those things listed in paragraph (2)(b) said, “Build the convention centre first.” How many jobs does the light rail really create? It might draw jobs into the corridor—it might—but how many jobs does it create for the investment? You have only to go to the CIE report over the last couple of years in support of the estimates committee that says it is very unclear, and the uplift is exceedingly unclear.
It is good of the government to try and take the credit, as they always do, for the hard work of a lot of individuals. What we have is a government whose policies work against business and have done so for a very long time. We have a government that cannot put in place a real reform agenda. We have a government that did not stand up to the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd slashing of 14,473 jobs. Yes, it was exacerbated by the Abbott government adding another 2,000 on top of it, but 14,000 jobs were gutted from the ACT courtesy of your Labor colleagues federally, and all of you were mute. The only party that consistently stands up for jobs in the ACT against all newcomers, whether they are federal Liberal or federal Labor is the Canberra Liberals.
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