Page 2515 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 9 August 2016
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who said, “Look, the reason we can’t purchase from you anymore is we’ve been told to purchase through someone else.”
Communication, I think, is one of the key things that businesses want from government. They want to be able to have an open dialogue. They want to be able to seek advice. They want to be able to have an understanding that when they have an issue and they go to government with it, it is not going to be used against them and that government will work collaboratively with them to achieve an outcome.
These local businesses, in the OfficeMax example, have been supplying products and have even tailored their businesses and business models to suit particular niches created by government. The ramifications of the decision to choose multinationals over local operators will be widely felt through the food chain, not just those businesses and their staff directly, but through the other local businesses that they use to carry out the functions that they do.
When it comes to jobs and jobs growth, I cannot fail to mention the Canberra Times report today which calls out the scare campaign being waged by ACT Labor as we head towards the election in just 66 days time. It is a scare campaign around jobs which is clearly unfounded and based on nothing. The article in today’s paper starts out by saying:
An analysis used by Labor to claim the Liberals would cost 2000 jobs is fundamentally flawed and significantly exaggerates the depth of any cuts.
It goes on to say:
Opinions were then sought from three economists, all of whom said the 2000 figure was misleading.
The analysis continues, and I quote again from the article:
Economics Professor Phil Lewis, who heads up the University of Canberra’s Labour Market Research Centre, described the analysis as “definitely wrong and flawed”.
I will repeat that. He described it as “definitely wrong and flawed”. This in itself is one of the greatest overreaches we have seen in this term of parliament being perpetuated by none other than the Chief Minister and Treasurer. If the Chief Minister and Treasurer is incapable of assessing the opposition’s costings, what hope has he got of continuing to run the Treasury books of this territory? What confidence can anyone in the territory have that the man at the helm is actually capable of being abreast of all of the issues and, in fact, presenting documents that are not definitely wrong or flawed?
The final issue I would like to touch on in the remaining time I have is one that a number of my colleagues have already touched on and that is the cost of rates. Rates bite every single property holder in the ACT and every single resident in the ACT that seeks to rent or lease a premise, be it commercial or residential. In the electorate, down in Tuggeranong, one of the primary issues is light rail. The cost of light rail
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