Page 1968 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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necessary to buy a future, to build a future, to leave a legacy? No. Leaving a legacy would require a vision and there is no vision with this crowd. As has been pointed out by the Leader of the Opposition and the shadow Treasurer, they have simply squandered any opportunity. You fix a leaky roof in the good times. You do not fix a leaky roof when rain is bucketing down and coming into the lounge room. It is too late then and it costs you too much. But that is the Jon Stanhope approach. They have had five years of sunshine, they have basked in the sunshine, they have looked at the holes in the roof, it has started to rain and he has gone, “Oh, goodness me, there is a hole in the roof. I didn’t notice that. I am alarmed because I was not alert.” No, Jon Stanhope has never been accused of being alert.
So what do you do? You increase assistance to business and tourism. It is not business welfare. It is buying a future. It is creating opportunities, it is creating employment and it is increasing your revenue base. But what is the easiest lever there to pull? The easiest lever is, of course, tourism. What has happened to tourism? Its funding has been slashed by $4.5 million over two years. At a time when the Northern Territory, the federal government and the Victorian government, just about any government you care to look at, have increased their tourism budgets because they understand how important it is we have cut ours. That is a strategy. We are going to fool them. We are actually going to wind back our tourism budget so that everybody is going to look at us and say, “Gee, they are winding it back. It must be a good thing if they are winding it back. Maybe we will do that in our budget next year.” No. They are all looking at us and laughing because they are going to take our conventions, they are going to take our business tourism, they are going to take our families, friends and relatives and they are going to take our international visitors because we do not want them. The signs are up: “Canberra is closed. Don’t bother coming. You can’t find us.”
We have done the same in business. The $5 million knowledge fund is all gone. There is a part of me that says that this is an anti Ted Quinlan budget, that we are going to get rid of every vestige of Ted Quinlan. Let’s see: the Brindabella Classic is gone; the knowledge fund is gone; the small business commissioner is gone; the HHS standards are gone. I think it is an attack on Ted Quinlan. This is envy.
In conclusion, what can I say? We have a government without vision, a government without passion, a government without compassion and a government that has failed the ACT community through its ineptitude and through its mismanagement.
MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Gentleman): Order! The member’s time has expired.
MR PRATT (Brindabella) (5.11): The 2006-07 budget handed down by this government this week is horrendous. Jon Stanhope, the new Treasurer, has managed to keep the ACT in an estimated surplus position of around $120.5 million, but that has not been achieved in sensible ways. Really, under Australian accounting standards, we actually have a deficit of $16.4 million for 2006-07 and, under government finance statistics, GFS, measures, we have a deficit of $80.3 million. That is not a surplus at all.
We see in this budget severe cuts to areas of essential services, schools, jobs, municipal services and roads, while still seeing massive wasteful expenditure on ideological pet projects. This government has again got its priorities all wrong by increasing spending
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