Page 1224 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 6 April 2016
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there, Mr Hinder. Instead of saying that it is all the federal government’s fault, you need to look at your own government, the government that you stand there so proudly as part of, and the additional pressure they have put over the years on low income earners. We see these imposts. They just increase them. If you consult what is happening in the outyears in the budget, you will see that they continue to increase.
Rates have climbed from $290 million in 2012-13 to $419 million in the revised estimates, and in the forward estimates they go from $419 million to $553 million in 2018-19, representing a further increase of 32 per cent. They just go up. Certainly within that there is some growth in the number of households, but it is nowhere near 32 per cent. This is a government intent on slugging taxpayers for their schemes, and the taxpayers will get their recourse come October. What you have is more taxation and fewer services. I am constantly reminded by my constituents of the pressures they have on their costs of living and the stresses that increasing rates put them under.
Of course, we then go back to the government’s obsession with the light rail project, which, if you take the $700 million and divide it by the number of households, will burden Canberra citizens with another $4,600 average cost per household just in construction alone. If, as predicted by Capital Metro, the costs of light rail over the life of the contract will be less than one per cent of government expenditure, that could be—we do not know—something like another $200 per household per year.
In average terms, for example, this will cost Wanniassa households around $11 million in total. For Gordon households, it will be about $10 million in total. For Calwell households, it will be about $8 million and for Isabella Plains households it will be $5.7 million. On top of that, if we add in the interest costs, payments to the network agency and the administrative costs of the Capital Metro Agency, it really will go well beyond $4,600 per household.
It is imperative that this government treat Canberra’s citizens fairly and compassionately, that we seek to stem the growth in rates and that the people of the ACT decide if they want a light rail system or not. The government promised when they went to the last election that they would do something like $30 million of preparatory work. They did not say they would start, they did not say that they would build and they certainly did not tell people how much it would cost.
This motion calls on the Labor government not to sign any contracts and to let the people of Canberra decide on light rail on 15 October. If they are so certain, they will wait until then. It will be simply a matter of weeks at that stage. So it is not unreasonable. If you are that certain, put it to the test through the election before light rail saddles future generations with the growing burden of debt and operating costs for a service that, let us face it, will be utilised at a fraction of its capacity.
In terms of sheer audacity for trying to put the best spin on light rail that one could put on it, Dr Bourke attended a function with Mr Rattenbury and me the other day at Gorman House, put on by the Childers Group. He said that people should think of light rail as a sort of $700 million mobile piece of art. He said they will be able to put skins on the outside of the tram sets and they could have changing pieces of art. So not only is it a tram set, but we have now got a $700 million mobile art gallery that
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