Page 3140 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 15 September 1993
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Government's involvement in business is merely to regulate it, and then only when it is necessary. It might be necessary to create an environment in which business operates, to protect the consumers perhaps. When business thrives, government can feel good - that is fine - because, apart from anything else, it generates a new revenue base for them. Taxes and other charges can be collected, not only from the business enterprises that are generating the new wealth but also from a lot of people who are making inputs to that business. Everybody is better off. Sometimes government itself might engage in business, but I can think of few times when they can do it better than the private sector. Sometimes they can do it as well - I am not arguing against that - but one would believe sometimes that this Follett Government does not even want to know about business.
I think the Chief Minister completely missed the target in her statement of 18 May in connection with this report. She attempted to set out the Government's policies for assisting business development in the ACT. In fact, the statement is mostly about her and the Government patting themselves on the back for a series of business developments or proposals in which the Government was, at best, the facilitator and in some cases had no part at all. If business is so good, why do we need to claim credit for everything that happens? Why do we claim credit for turning the airport into an international freight terminal? That came from no initiative of this Government, but one would swear sometimes that it was in fact a government initiative.
While the Government can preen itself when looking into the past, it is not so good at telling us how good it is going to be in the future, and that is what this ought to be about. There ought to be a strategy that tells us what is going to happen in five years' time, and that is what it attempts to set out to do. I was disappointed in it, but I am more disappointed in what the Government does with it. It gets a report like this that does suggest some good things that should be done, but again we get a budget that does not pick up any of it. We are not going to spend any money on anything like this. We will spend money and we will ask people to commit their resources and their time to thinking about the problem and giving us some good suggestions; but when it comes down to the point of actually doing something about it this Government fails, as it does in so many other ways.
Madam Speaker, I think it is yet another case where this Government is long on words, long on claiming credit for things that it has no control over and makes no input into. When it comes to delivering the goods, to stimulating the private sector that is so necessary at the moment in Canberra - I repeat, for two reasons; firstly, to generate additional revenues for the Territory, and, secondly, to create the jobs that are not going to be created anywhere else - we do not see any performance at all on the part of the Government. We need a lot more action, a lot less talk, and a lot less of claiming credit for things that we have had nothing to do with.
Debate (on motion by Mr Lamont) adjourned.
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