Page 1958 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 May 2009
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should have an explanation from the Chief Minister as to why the new document that he has put in place to replace the economic white paper—Capital development: towards our second century—is a better document.
Clearly, we now have a contradiction between the Chief Minister and the Treasurer. In his foreword to the document the Chief Minister states:
We have delivered on the strategies and initiatives of the … Economic White Paper.
Fundamental to the economic white paper was Ted Quinlan’s insistence that we had to diversify the economic base. If we want to have a community, if we want to have jobs and security in the future, there is a need to diversify the ACT economy to build a stronger private sector.
In the foreword to the document the Chief Minister says he has delivered that, and that is why this debate is important today. He has not. The data shows that. As a percentage of employment, the private sector is going backward under the Stanhope-Gallagher government. Ted Quinlan said diversify, Jon says we have and Treasurer Gallagher runs up the economic flag of surrender and says it is not going to happen. She sought to argue that it would not be possible to increase the relative share of private sector employment. She defended the status quo. She said, “That is how it is. We are not even going to try.” We now have three positions from government and we have the Treasurer in waiting, who could be the real Treasurer one day.
When the Treasurer does not have an answer the glib lines are rolled out. She says that we are never going to have mining or manufacturing. We have never called for that. We did call for sustainability industries. If you check the Hansard you will see that Mr Hargreaves said, “I do not even know what that is and, what is more, I do not care.” He does not care. The Treasurer of the day, the Chief Minister, said exactly the same thing.
We have a government that is in close alliance with the Greens, through the Green-Labor agreement, that is not interested in things like sustainability industries. Ms Hunter should be absolutely ashamed to move an amendment to protect a government that has walked away from so many former government initiatives that would have led to the creation of sustainability industries in this territory. The no waste by 2010 strategy had, at its core, an understanding that we would get to a point where the last 10 per cent of the waste is difficult and new solutions would have to be found. That is new industries. We had a greenhouse strategy with real targets in it that required us to come up with new initiatives, businesses and ideas to actually deliver targets. That has been abandoned. Yet we have got the Greens comfortably in bed with the Labor Party and the Greens-Labor alliance seeking to modify my motion today and saying that it is all about information.
One of these days the Greens will learn that they are going to have to call this government to account. One area where they have failed is in diversifying the economy and living up to the priorities set out on page 56. Initially, nine sectors were targeted, which means there were going to be more, and one was environmental
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