Page 2008 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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In the last couple of days the Chief Minister has been bollocking everybody who chose Victoria. What do you call it—the jurisdiction of choice? You go jurisdiction picking. The Chief Minister is just as bad. Victoria spends $8 per head. How many people are there in Victoria, five or six million? That is $48 million. It is a ridiculous notion to say that, if we spend $8 a head, with 300,000 people, that is $2.4 million. We have to have a base of funding—
Mr Stanhope: So you want us to adopt their land tax rates but not their tourism spend rates?
MR SMYTH: That shows how ignorant you are of business, of investment—
Mr Stanhope: You want us to have the same land tax as Victoria but not the same expenditure on tourism. We get it now.
MR SMYTH: You have to have a base of funding before it works. Without that we simply would not compete.
Mr Stanhope: Humbug!
MR SMYTH: Oh, humbug! There we go—humbug! I note again in this summary of what I assume is the Costello report that the answer to all this, of course, is to leave it to the feds; the national institutions are spending enough money anyway. The federal government is spending money on the war memorial, the national gallery, Old Parliament House and the portrait gallery. They are not promoting brand Canberra. They are not tasked with promoting brand Canberra. It is disingenuous to say that, because they are spending in those areas, it is covered.
Apparently the NCA is going to pick up the slack, because that is what the NCA should do. Well, it is not. The NCA has a charter to promote certain parts of the nation’s capital; it does not necessarily promote Canberra as such. There is a difference. Over the last couple of years the ACTC and the NCA have worked really well together because they have defined which bit one is going to do and which bit the other is going to do and how they mesh together. It is teamwork. But now half the team has gone. It is like playing rugby without the forwards—we are just not going to put our grunt into this to make it work.
What is the cost? Based on these figures and based on work done by other people in the last couple of days, the prediction is that 1,200 jobs are at risk and something like $20 million in revenue will be forgone. Have you included the revenue forgone in your budget? I will bet you have not. It is silly for us to stand here tonight to discuss dragging ACTC back into the department, unless, of course, there is an ulterior motive here. The more I look at this budget, it becomes a “let’s bury Ted Quinlan’s memory” budget because he betrayed the government. Ted Quinlan betrayed the Chief Minister by leaving the government in the lurch. The Chief Minister was not alert, but he was alarmed when he found out, so it is all Ted Quinlan’s fault.
The bill to enact the Australian Capital Tourist Corporation was a bill sponsored by Treasurer Quinlan. The Small Business Commission, which is also going, was a
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