Page 1466 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2016
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is his economic strategy: “We’ll let the feds spend our way out of our economic malaise.”
This is all being said at a time when they are cutting the police, and they are now cutting Access Canberra. It has not survived for a year and he is already winding it back because he cannot afford it. So let us talk about your efforts, Mr Barr, Mr Chief Minister. If you want to have any credibility in this space, you need to have a pure record, and you do not.
I think it is a dreadful shame that the cultural institutions are being cut. At the heart of it, under their various acts, most of the cultural institutions have legislated activities that they must carry out under law. They are the things that cannot be cut, largely. It means that things like marketing of the public programs, education, exhibitions, travelling shows—the things that add gloss to the institutions, and which Canberra relies on a great deal—are the things that get cut. I think it is incredibly short sighted. We need a long-term cultural institutions policy about how they are funded, and about the cultural institutions that are missing from the national landscape that could be put in place here in the ACT. And this is where they should be, except perhaps for the National Maritime Museum. It is hard to get an Oberon class submarine and a destroyer to the ACT. Ideally, Sydney Cove or Sydney Harbour is a great place for that.
The cultural institutions are important to the national psyche, and I would have thought that in Malcolm Turnbull’s creative and agile world the arts in this way would have been bolstered. I think it is a shame, and I have made those comments known to my colleagues on the hill.
It is very important that we get it right for Canberra. My understanding is that, according to budget paper No 3, with respect to total payments to the states in 2015-16, the ACT received from the commonwealth $1.845 billion. In 2016-17, in the coming year, it will go up to $2.067 billion. That is an increase of $222 million, or about 12 per cent. With respect to commonwealth payments to the states, on page 6 of budget paper No 3, it would appear that it goes from $1.8 billion to $2 billion—a 12 per cent increase. In tough times, and having regard to the budget situation and priorities, that is a number that people should be welcoming.
There are other flow-ons. Certainly, with respect to the defence spend, we have often talked about not silicon valley but khaki valley, whereby defence tech is situated here in the ACT. That is certainly something that I have spoken about on many occasions and will continue to do so. As early as 2004 we said that innovation and the arts were the path to the future in our creative Canberra policy. Defence was one of those industries that featured 12 years ago. It should feature now and it should feature well into the future.
Clearly, when the ATO undertake big changes, as they will have to do having regard to the administration of company tax and superannuation, that tends to mean an increase in staff. You can look at the glory days of the introduction of the GST, which saw a huge increase in staffing in the ATO. So there is potentially a plus there as well.
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