Page 2240 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 August 2007
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Ours is a narrow service based economy. We have no mines. We have no agricultural industry ...
The ACT is a small jurisdiction with a clever, well-educated population and with a number of high-quality tertiary institutions. We should focus on taking advantage of this and expanding our base. That is why the Canberra Liberals have a plan to develop the private sector by encouraging industries requiring a highly skilled base, which I have referred to. This policy was highly successful, with the number of private sector employees exceeding the number of public sector employees by the end of our term in government.
During its first term, the current government continued to have expansion of Canberra’s economic base as a significant goal. Its economic white paper released in December 2003 had as its goal “greater economic opportunity and high employment by supporting commercial, educational and research activities”. Mr Quinlan famously described it as “a statement of the bleeding obvious”. Unfortunately, it is not bleeding obvious to the Chief Minister. Mr Stanhope has scrapped the economic aspects of the economic white paper. In our dissenting report, Mrs Burke and I called on Mr Stanhope to present a clear timetable of actions to expand Canberra’s economic base. However, I see little hope in the short term that the Chief Minister will realise how short-sighted he actually has been.
We see this in his response to the business community, who have been rightly critical in the past couple of years of his economic policies. For example, Craig Sloan, the Chairman of the Canberra Business Council, recently said that the plan to widen our economic base “was largely undone by the government’s slash and burn approach to economic development”. Unfortunately, the Chief Minister has dismissed the concerns of the business community as whingeing. He just does not get it. He is keen to take credit for our strong economy, which, in fact, is mainly due to the national economy and mainly due to the federal government. However, his failure to work on broadening our economic base has left us vulnerable if a new federal government is elected and decides to cut Canberra’s public sector, as mentioned by my colleague Mr Mulcahy only a few minutes ago. Shortly after the budget speech, Mr Stanhope said:
We are susceptible as a small jurisdiction in that we don’t have our destiny entirely in our hands. Decisions that the Federal Government might make, particularly if there’s a change of government, could have significant impacts on employment levels or construction activity and our budget would suffer immediately.
Lindsay Tanner, federal Labor’s finance spokesman, is threatening to cut $3 billion from the public sector, which will have a significant impact on employment levels, economic activity and the ACT budget. Guess where a lot of that is going to come from? Canberra might well be paying the price very shortly for federal Labor cuts to the public sector and the Chief Minister’s lack of vision. He needs to broaden his base for that eventuality. He needs to broaden his base to take account of the inevitable slump that has to occur at some stage.
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