Page 2373 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 30 July 2019
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Recommendation 27 is another one about grant funding: that it needs to be made easier and for a longer period. Recommendation 30 is:
… that the ACT Government expand the Register of Disciplinary Actions or establish a separate register, to genuinely reflect the compliance and rectification work being done on building sites around Canberra and give clarity to consumers as they go through the process of choosing a builder.
This is important because, unfortunately, buyers in general have no idea who the dodgy builders are. How would you tell? How is the average punter going to see if a new apartment block is going to leak in a couple of years time? You have no chance. This is where we really need more government action and support.
Recommendation 42 is about tax reform. It is:
… that the ACT Government release in full to the community, any research commissioned by, and findings of the tax reform advisory committee, as soon as they have been seen by Cabinet and prior to 2020-21 budget papers, where possible.
We have had seven years of tax reform; it is time to stop, look and see what progress has been made and what lessons have been learned. If we want tax reform to continue in this jurisdiction, and if we want to maintain the support of the community for it, we need to make sure that stakeholders and the broader community understand what has happened and can see what will happen in the future. We need to make sure that, while people may not be overly enthusiastic about paying taxes, there at least is a widespread acknowledgement in the community about how our taxation system is fair and appropriate.
Recommendations 52 to 55 are complementary to recommendation 20 on the climate emergency. Again, I am very pleased that they have all been put forward. They do more to elaborate on what we are talking about.
Recommendation 52 is about major projects and says that these need to be explicitly considered from a climate change perspective; be compatible with the trajectory to zero emissions; and, if they are not compatible or cannot be made compatible, proceed only under some sort of special consideration. That would seem to me to be common sense at this point.
Along those lines, recommendation 54 is that ACT infrastructure be planned and built to be resilient to the changing climate. Again, that is pretty much common sense. It is fairly clear that our climate is changing; it is getting hotter and drier.
On the issue of it getting hotter, I would like to share with you something I saw on Facebook over the weekend, with someone talking about a particular place and saying, “This is the hottest summer we have had for 150 years.” We need to reframe that, as suggested, to say that this is quite possibly the coolest summer that we are going to have for 150 years or a few thousand years. My point is that there no reason to think that it is going to change and get better any time soon. Our climate is getting hotter
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