Page 764 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 1 May 2007
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“Look, we haven’t missed it for 18 months, but here’s a little story that we can run. Here’s a little issue around government reporting that perhaps we can get a little run out for a day, because we have no other ideas; we have no policy and no other ideas.” After 18 months they suddenly realised that the report, which essentially is constructed for internal operating purposes, is no longer made publicly available.
There are, as I have just indicated, a raft of other accountability measures and opportunities, for a Liberal Party that could be bothered to work, to pursue in relation to a capacity to assess progress in relation to the delivery of capital works. The quarterly capital works format was, as I said earlier, part of a review of budget related requirements and, as I said earlier, it was decided that the reports were not particularly user friendly. It was an allocation of resources that it was felt might better be utilised by the government to focus on the priorities of delivering services and capital works projects and programs, rather than this focus on a quarterly report.
Mr Mulcahy: Snuck it through and thought you could get away with it.
MR STANHOPE: Snuck it through! The shadow Treasurer says we “snuck it through”. It took him 18 months to notice that it had been “snuck through”. Where was he—missing in action for 18 months and then it was “snuck through” 18 months ago? That is how important it was to the shadow Treasurer. That is how important it was to the Liberal Party: it took them 18 months to notice. It took 18 months to notice that it was not there. That is how important it was—18 months. You can see the light going off in his head—flash, bang! “Oh, goodness me, it’s 18 months now, and I didn’t notice.” I wonder what he was doing in the 18 months that caused him perhaps not to notice how important and how vital these reports were.
The opposition had not missed them for 18 months but all of a sudden they are a vital accountability measure. They had not missed them for 18 months and then all of a sudden they are absolutely vital to the accountability and transparency of government administration within the territory. What a load of humbug—confected humbug! They had not noticed that the report had not been around for 18 months, but all of a sudden it is a vital measure of a government’s preparedness to be accountable and transparent. They were completely irrelevant for the last 18 months, until all of a sudden somebody gets up one day in a new sitting week and thinks, “Oh, goodness me, we have got no policies that we can talk about—absolutely none. We have actually promised to spend somewhere in the order of a couple of hundred million dollars we don’t have and we’ve agreed to cut up to $200 million of taxes and charges, but we want to keep the community’s attention away from that for a little bit longer—that in government we’ll have no money to provide capital works ourselves because we’re actually abolishing the fire levy and we’re abolishing a whole range of other taxes. We refuse to collect the water abstraction charge. We’re going to cut the payroll tax”—according to Mr Mulcahy, a bad and wicked tax—“we’re going to do away with stamp duty.”
We see today that the Liberals are going to go ahead with the ecobank—$100 million for 10,000 houses in the ACT. We have got 130,000 houses—an open-ended banking facility is at the heart of the Liberal Party’s new-found commitment to climate change. Mr Mulcahy resurrects a totally discredited policy of Mrs Dunne’s in this place when she promised at the last election hundreds of millions of dollars of expenditure
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