Page 3673 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 21 November 2007
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purpose grants and specific road funding grants. This represents a 4.2 per cent rise over last year’s allocation. Such grants actually help local governments maintain infrastructure around Australia. They can be used from anything from hospitals to sporting fields. The ACT government has a tendency to cry poor and then throw money at statues and other silly projects that benefit no one. Indeed, we have a list of white elephants which I am not going to repeat. We do that ad nauseam here.
The coalition government gives $20.4 million annually to the NCA. That money is used to employ 87 staff who maintain the parliamentary triangle, organise some key events, support our national institutions and regulate development and planning to ensure that Canberra’s unique cityscape is preserved. Federal Labor has pledged to cut funding to the NCA by $11.5 million, which could not possibly be achieved without actually destroying the agency. The bill for the entire staff is only $8.7 million. They are not going to be able to cut funding by over $11 million by just doing away with three or four positions, as they claim. They would have to cut the staff, program funding and particularly cut our national institutions and the work that is done there. That is work that is piggybacked off the territory government.
What we would see under Rudd, backed by all of his Labor cohorts in government around Australia, is increasing secrecy and increasing lack of transparency. I think that is already obvious in the refusal of the Labor government in New South Wales to release the information that would show that a federal Labor candidate is ineligible to stand for federal parliament. Imagine this on a day-to-day basis. We all know that the ACT government also hides behind secrecy. We still have not seen, of course, the functional review that was the basis of the closure of schools in the ACT. Indeed, in health the minister hides behind the assertion that internal reviews and due process—behind the scenes, of course; always behind the scenes—are all actually being done. We are supposed to take this on trust and ignore all external evidence to the contrary.
With respect to the NCA, of course, Canberrans expect a robust debate on planning issues, and emasculating that body, as federal Labor promises to do, will remove that level of scrutiny. There will be no one to guide the development of significant national assets, such as the new National Portrait Gallery and no one to look after and maintain the Old Parliament House gardens or the memorials on Anzac Parade. The NCA is responsible for all of those things.
Might we not suppose a much more ideological bent for the NCA, influenced perhaps by the Chief Minister? We might have political memorials like the SIEV X poles or more portraits of Labor divinities like Al Grassby. In the ACT the current local government tries to pretend to be responsible an economic manager by increasing taxes to make up for what it squanders on fripperies like the $1 million worth of artworks in the entrance to Canberra and the human rights compatible prison to house our ever decreasing number of prisoners—at a significant cost to taxpayers to boot.
One of these new taxes, a new fee on top of the water abstraction charge—which the opposition has pointed out is very possibly illegal due to its unconstitutionality—has blown out the costs of maintaining public gardens by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Recently I was pleased to see that the Howard-Costello government promised $10 million on water projects just to assist a few of our national icons such as the
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