Page 1250 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 25 March 2009
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When the Carnell government came to office in 1995, 60 per cent of the people in the ACT were employed in the public sector and 40 per cent were employed in the private sector. When it left office in 2001, that had reversed. There was 60 per cent employment in the private sector. This diversified the economy. We were not depending just on the federal government and being a one-business town. That trend has reversed. Let me quote some words from an Access Economics report on that point:
For many years economists have been expecting to see greater diversification in the ACT’s sector base—that the degree of over-reliance on the government administration and Defence sector shown in Chart 5 above would fall over time as Canberra became less of a ‘one company town’.
For many years that is exactly what happened. Chart 6, which is in terms of employment rather than output, shows that Canberra’s economy spent some time through to the late 1990s diversifying its sectoral base. In particular, public sector employment continued to fall as a share of total employment, dipping below 50 per cent in the early 1990s and staying below thereafter.
It has gone back. The latest numbers I have seen now would show that 55 per cent of people are again employed in the public sector. So attempts to diversify have either stalled or gone backwards. That is because of decisions taken by this government which did not build on the earlier successes of previous Labor and Liberal governments—the efforts that they made in the early 1990s.
We see the government’s inability to come to grips with diversifying the economic base in the recently released Capital developments: towards our second century paper delivered in August 2008. It has totally walked away from the economic white paper which had proposed that actions be taken. It had nine sectors that the government then wanted to develop. What are we reduced to now? We are reduced to three strategic themes: no action, no plans, no ideas. This is a government that is clueless—absolutely clueless—on how to diversify the economic base of the ACT.
I turn to paragraph (1)(c) of my motion. The government for many years has taken full credit for the favourable economic position of the ACT. But when it is not favourable it blames everybody else; we are told that it is a global financial crisis or it is the fault of the federal government.
The Treasurer said that when the times were really good it was to the government’s credit that they had done it. But, if you look at the spending, the majority of that spending, in fact, was a consequence of policies of the Howard Liberal government that did invest in the ACT. It built assets here. It sponsored the building boom and now the government blame the federal government for its cutback on spending saying that it is not their fault. You cannot have it both ways.
If in the good times it was federal spending, then give them the credit and say you were simply along for the ride, because that is all that was happening. If it is in the bad times that you want to blame the federal government, then you still must take
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