Page 561 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 21 February 2018
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impact that the school closure in Hall had on the small businesses there, and he has repeated it very often since then.
This government do not care about small business because they are not unionised labour. They are not unionised labour and, therefore, they do not get a look-in with the Labor Party and the Greens. The Labor Party and the Greens are in bed with the CFMEU; they are both funded by the CFMEU. And the Labor Party is in bed with every other union because of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that it receives in campaign donations every year. They do not care about the small business man who goes out and buys himself a job and a superannuation plan by investing in a business. To have the government come along and say, “We will completely and utterly undermine your business model without any reflection upon what that will do for you”—and the tenor of this motion here and the tenor of the comments made by Ms Le Couteur—shows that they just do not care.
The minister went on to talk very quickly about other aspects of the green waste collection process and how successful it was and how much the people of Weston Creek like it. We do not doubt that. We are not talking about whether the green waste collection system is a good idea or whether we should have food waste in the system; we are talking about the fact that this government has made a decision that takes away the business livelihood of a number of Canberrans and their families, and that they face destitution because they have large mortgages, probably held against their houses, for equipment and trucks to make their business work. This government has shown that it has no respect, no care and no consideration for those people whose livelihoods are at risk.
For the minister to come in here and say that if they have a rigid B licence they can apply to become a garbage truck driver with the person who is putting them out of business is an insult, a complete insult. The minister should be ashamed of herself. She has left. I understand that she is ill, but the people who are going to lose their jobs are going to lose their livelihoods and possibly their homes. They are feeling pretty sick about it as well. The minister should be ashamed.
Let me go to Ms Le Couteur and the points that she made: let us distract from this by talking about the food waste stream. Yes, it is important. I am not trivialising the food waste scheme. But, by doing that, she trivialises the real concerns put forward in Mr Wall’s motion. I am very angry, on behalf of the business owners of the ACT, about the way that they have been treated in this place by Minister Fitzharris and Ms Le Couteur today.
MR WALL (Brindabella) (6.35): I do not know where to start. This is one of the few occasions where—
Mrs Dunne: You’re lost for words?
MR WALL: I am lost for words; thank you, Mrs Dunne. We debate a lot of things in this place. Most of them are trivial and are on the margins of most people’s day-to-day lives. Just look at the daily program today. “Growth in the ACT economy”
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