Page 5515 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 17 November 2010
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them. This government are the major influencer of these things in this town. They control land supply, they control taxation, they control the rollout of much of the infrastructure. They control the planning laws. All of these things impact and they all put upward pressure. And the response we get from this government is that they do not care.
Their best defence is “we’re not quite as bad as New South Wales”. New South Wales Labor is doing an even worse job than the ACT Labor government: that is their best defence. Apparently not on everything, though, because the Treasurer said what a great deal giving up 50 per cent of the GST was. Apparently, even Kristina Keneally could do better than that. She got the same deal for 30 per cent. She only had to give up control of 30 per cent of the New South Wales GST pool in order to get the additional commonwealth funding.
Again, on most things, their defence is “we’re not quite as bad as New South Wales Labor”, except maybe on waiting lists. Waiting lists were a lot worse than under New South Wales Labor. In fact, New South Wales Labor, in comparison to ACT Labor, have done a sterling job on waiting lists. By way of comparison, they have done much better. We have a health minister who is doing a worse job than all the series of New South Wales health ministers that we have seen over the last few years—Reba Meagher and John Della Bosca.
We will not be supporting these two amendments, the one by Ms Hunter and the one by Mr Stanhope, because effectively they are both making a similar and spurious argument. The spurious argument is this: the government does not have any influence. That is simply not true. That argument is wrong. There are some things in this motion that they directly control, such as rates. There are other things that they have a substantial influence over, such as the cost of housing and the cost of rents, and there are other things where they have a very large impact through their policy settings—and we see that with electricity prices and we see it with water prices.
Do they have all the impact on all those things? No, but they have a significant impact on all of those areas and their policies should be directed towards taking the burden from Canberrans rather than adding extra burdens to Canberrans. That is the simple message of this motion, and it is today being rejected by the Labor Party and rejected by the Greens. It is being rejected because they simply do not care. They do not care about these issues. They have shown it time and time again. Every time we raise these issues in the Assembly, the Labor Party and the Greens get together and say, “No, we’re not going to do anything about those cost of living issues because we want to pursue this policy or that policy.”
I do not think the Treasurer goes out to the suburbs when they say, “There’s no-one in Canberra who doesn’t support the arboretum. Everyone now supports the arboretum.” I do not think she has ventured to Tuggeranong, Gungahlin or Belconnen recently.
Mr Hanson: Do they all support public art, Mr Seselja?
MR SESELJA: And public art, apparently. Apparently, now it is almost 100 per cent, because according to the Treasurer it is everyone but the Liberal Party. Everyone but
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