Page 947 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 25 February 2009
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When you look at the Treasury proposals that have been brought forward by this government, you will see the scheme is nothing but a litany of failure. And this is another scheme that follows that standard format: “We have got a problem, we need to do something quick.” And the best example was the rating proposal brought forward by the government where even the then Treasurer, Ted Quinlan, finally admitted that it sounded like a good idea at the time.
I am sure a government under pressure, a government that did not want to address the real issues of the cost of land and planning fees because they were taking that money and spending it—and, as I have said many times in this place, at the top of the cycle they were planning for deficits; at the top of the economic cycle we were spending more than we earned, not putting anything away for the future or diversifying the income—of course is not going to touch those people that it was squeezing until they bled. Of course you are not going to stop squeezing before they had died, because you needed that money because you could not manage your budget. You come up with schemes that seem to be an answer, that make it look like you are doing something and, indeed, that sound potentially plausible. But when the detail is gone through and the outcomes are looked at, those schemes deliver nothing for those in housing stress.
Indeed, you can make the parallels. The Chief Minister is now saying, “The global financial crisis has stopped all the banks.” But none of the banks, before the full effect of the global financial crisis set in late last year, were going to lend on this. None of them have come forward. It is well and good to say, “We have got people interested.” We can only take the Chief Minister at his word for what they actually said.
To say “in-principle agreement”—“yes, we will look at that for you; we have got an in-principle agreement; they will look at it for us”—does not mean or say that any of the banks were ever going to lend on it. And they have not. They have not before the global financial crisis and they have not during the global financial crisis. We are going to hear about the global financial crisis a lot in the coming months, simply because the government is going to hide. The theme song of this government is going to more and more be “not, not, not responsible”.
What we have got is a scheme from a government, in the Chief Minister’s own words, that says half the households in Canberra are disabled. What sort of city have you created, Chief Minister, through your Canberra plan, your spatial plan and your economic white paper, that you now consider half the households in the ACT are financially disabled? What a sad indictment of your government that you have created the situation where half of the households in your care you consider to be disabled.
You have done nothing to address the root cause of that disability, which is the price you charge for land—until recently you were the only land seller in town—and the fees and charges and the planning system that you have. This problem was created by you and your government, by your government’s policies, and it should be rectified by your government. If not, get out of the way and we will.
The problem with hiding behind the global financial crisis is that it does not address what is going on. People still need to buy. People want to buy. We now know that half the households have less than $75,000 as their combined gross income.
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