Page 1582 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 May 2017
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now the most confident in the country. New housing starts have more than doubled over the course of 2016, not only generating jobs and economic activity but contributing to increased supply to assist with housing affordability.
Amidst all of this negativity from the federal government about Canberra and our role in the nation, locally we have a positive plan for our city. We will get on with the job of delivering it. It starts with our budget next month. And we can perhaps invite our federal counterparts to spend a bit more time here in Canberra to learn how good government is done.
MS ORR (Yerrabi) (4.01): It is my pleasure to speak in support of Ms Cheyne’s motion today, and I thank her for moving it. My colleagues in the Assembly will no doubt recall I recently moved a motion opposing the federal government’s decision to relocate the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, the APVMA. I spoke in opposition to what amounted to a pork-barrelling exercise for Barnaby Joyce’s electorate of New England.
In trying to move the APVMA to Armidale, the federal government has wasted $25.6 million of public money. And what did we get for this price? We have had 20 regulatory scientists and 28 staff members resign, taking with them 204 years’ of experience, and the number of unfinished assessments has grown eleven times over in the space of a year. Given this, perhaps we should have heralded the concerns of the agricultural chemical peak body CropLife in their submission to the Senate inquiry where they stated the relocation posed a real and genuine threat to the APVMA’s ability to perform its function and would cause delays for at least three years.
You do not need a cost-benefit analysis to know that this apparent “trial” is a complete and utter failure that should be put to rest. But rather than putting the trial down to bad judgement and moving on, the Liberal-National Coalition is determined to expand on their error, requiring all departments to justify why they should not be moved to regional areas.
Not content with the embarrassment caused by having 20 Australian public servants working out of a fast food restaurant, the tail of the coalition has once again wagged the dog. The great myth of the virtues of decentralisation ignores the previous failed attempts we have made in Australia. Just as we witnessed in the APVMA case with staff refusing relocation packages and the resignation of the chief executive, similar problems were experienced when decentralisation of industry was attempted in the 1970s.
If the Nationals had done their research on this, they would have understood they were setting themselves up for abject failure. But should we be surprised by this lack of detail in policy development by the conservatives? When asked for a response to a Productivity Commission report warning against the federal government’s decentralisation policy, the Hon Mr Joyce responded by saying:
If you had a Productivity Commission report into Canberra back in 1900, they would have said don’t build Canberra.
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