Page 1441 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 May 2006
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A fair society is one that minimises poverty, and the best way we can minimise poverty is by increasing access to work. The government is constantly lauding itself for a low unemployment rate, but there is a concern that that group of people that are unemployed is a fairly intractable figure. It has not changed over the years. The Greens have been asking the government to look at how we can move those people off welfare, which is their main means of support, into work.
But the other side of this is that we need a good social infrastructure. The best way to assist poor people is to ensure that they have access to good health and education services. I think that sometimes people on the Liberal side of this house do not recognise that that is good for us all. If people are healthy throughout their lives, they are not going to be a big cost on the health system. If people are educated, they are more likely to get a job and therefore contribute to our economy.
Something that both sides of the house seem to have avoided today is access to housing for all. A healthy environment requires from government planning an infrastructure that will reduce our impact on the environment. In the ACT that means reducing use of resources, most particularly water, oil and coal. Finally, we must manage the natural environment. Again, that involves management of our water resources, catchments and our biodiversity. We are very lucky to have some of the last woody grasslands in Australia.
How we do that, of course, how we measure how we are doing that, is through a triple-bottom-line approach to our budget, which I hope the government have been struggling with this year. We will see how well they are going when we see the budget. The objective of a triple-bottom-line approach is to measure how well budgets are delivering on these aspects. An economy is not just for itself. It has always been a way of measuring our progress and how we are going to achieve other goals. That seems to have been forgotten.
After listening to Mr Mulcahy’s speech, I am still mystified as to who the “select few” are. The government has chosen to pick a few groups that it feels it is doing well in serving, but I have not yet heard who they are. Perhaps I will hear from the opposition as further speakers raise their voices. It cannot be the cappuccino set. Perhaps it is. Sometimes they are called the chardonnay set. I do not know that they are doing too well because the prices of coffee and chardonnay remain high, although there is a proliferation of places to drink those things.
Perhaps it is the property developers, who are benefiting from some of the highest rents in Australia, although I would not have thought that the Libs would really mind if the economy delivered to them since they usually speak of them as their constituency. It certainly is not the group that is concerned about the environment. This government has not kept its promises about the environment. It is more inclined to see investment in the environment as a cost and not something that it should do.
The Greens are not opposed to a deficit as such as long as that deficit can be funded over the term of the government. The government knew that it had four years. It could have presented a view that took a four-year approach. Of course, four years is actually not long enough. A lot of the problem is that governments plan within an electoral cycle
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