Page 1132 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 8 April 2008
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
squeeze-them-till-they-bleed policy on land release and the property sector. We see it in the damage that they have done to business development and research development in the ACT through their unwarranted and enormous cuts in the 2006-07 budget. We have seen it with their attacks on tourism where they have gutted the tourism budget and made it more difficult for tourism operators to operate effectively in the ACT. We see it every day in the way that they behave towards business, because they refuse to listen to business. The reality is sad.
The results that we see from the latest Hudson report that were released last week demonstrate this most emphatically. Overall business confidence has collapsed; confidence among government employers has also collapsed. What is the Chief Minister’s response to this latest business news? “Well, I am not surprised. I am not surprised,” he goes on. That is said following his comments only a few short days ago in the Assembly, when he said that prospects for the ACT economy were extremely good. That is absolutely astounding. I do not know who the Chief Minister is listening to and I do not know what the Chief Minister is reading, but how you can take those lists from Hudson, from Sensis, from Access, from ANZ, from Westpac and from the reserve governor and ignore all of that, as is being done, is absolutely astounding to me.
I expect that, if the Chief Minister is true to form, when he gets up here—if he deigns to return, because, of course, in his own arrogant way he never sits through these speeches because he does not believe in the supremacy of the Assembly but only the supremacy of the executive and himself—he will come down and he will tell us that we have never had it so good, that there is close to full employment and so on. It is quite interesting. He quoted Peter Martin during question time today, and I am pleased he did, because Peter Martin makes some comments on this. In an article of 15 March entitled “The day we heard the economy snap”, Peter Martin writes:
Job offers react to spending and investment with a lag—six months is one estimate. They tell you where you’ve been, not what lies ahead.
It’s a lesson the Macquarie Bank’s Rory Robertson says he learned painfully when he worked for the research department of the Reserve Bank at the time when the economy snapped in the late 1980s.
He says once a month at the Reserve Bank’s headquarters in Martin Place Sydney a gaggle of economists (often including the present Governor Glenn Stevens) would huddle around the single news-screen to read the employment numbers, often marvelling at the ongoing strength of full-time employment and still-sliding unemployment.
‘Later, it turned out that the economy actually was heading south, not waiting for the jobs data to catch up,’ he said this week.
He goes on to say that the economic chiefs at both Westpac and the ANZ believe that economic growth is now heading south. This is the dilemma. If economic growth is heading south—all the pundits and all the experts seem to say it is—we are not preparing for what might occur in the ACT. We are not preparing for this, despite all the indicators that have been on the table for the Chief Minister to take note of.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .