Page 106 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 14 December 2016
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make things possible in Canberra. This was on full display just a couple of weeks ago when the Deputy Chief Minister was asked about Qatar Airways coming to Canberra.
Of course, the government was not aware of this and nor should the government necessarily be aware of this. It is in effect a private arrangement that they have come to. As long as they get commonwealth regulatory approval, they can in effect open up this market. When the Deputy Chief Minister was asked about this, she said, “I look forward to seeing their proposal.”
Why would Qatar Airways put a proposal to the ACT government? Unless they actually do want some money for some reason or they do want some kind of favourable treatment, maybe they could put through a proposal. But inherent in the Deputy Chief Minister’s comments was that everything has to go through the government, that the government has to be the linchpin for every commercial transaction.
The truth is that we should be allowing more businesses to transact business in Canberra freely. We should not have a government that meddles at every single opportunity, which is exactly what they like to do. Of course, this government, like so many Labor governments, seems to trumpet debts and borrowings as a kind of virtue. They claim that all the great infrastructure projects are funded by debt. Therefore, debt is a good thing and we should be celebrating debt.
They also have an excuse for being in debt at every stage of the economic cycle. When times are tough they say, “We need to debt fund projects.” When times are good, they claim that that is the time to borrow money. There seems to be an excuse for debt at every single step along the way, but there never seems to be an excuse to actually repay this debt. That is why we are paying $172 million per year in interest.
Another thing that I have spoken about before in this place, which I think is worth reiterating, is the fact that the ACT is an island in New South Wales. We have to be mindful of the fact that the policy settings that we have can, in part, be negated by what happens over the border in New South Wales.
Of course, the most classic example is that of housing affordability. We have land in Throsby that the LDA thinks is a great achievement to sell at $1,000 a square metre. Meanwhile, you go just a few kilometres away in New South Wales and you are getting land at $450 a square metre in Googong. How is it that land that is virtually the same, a very similar distance away from the city, is double the price? How is it double the price of land in Googong? Similar services, similar infrastructure, yet you have got double the cost. It does beg the question: why is it that they think they can get away with this?
Of course, as we have seen in the Throsby auction, they are struggling to get away with it at the moment. Yes, they did well in the first auction when they tried to set their prices. Then in subsequent sales there simply was not the interest. It does beg the question about whether the market has woken up to the fact that this is a government that is gouging them when it comes to land prices.
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