Page 2285 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 22 June 2011
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These are the things. This is about the third time this motion has come to this place put forward by the Leader of the Opposition. I accept that he can use his full 15 minutes to put all the blame at my feet, but often there are absolutely no ideas about what he would do to control the things he is so concerned about. In a minority government, there is nothing to stop any member in this place—if they are concerned with the way rates and charges are being levied—in coming up with ideas and proposals to put downward pressure on them. We have not seen that. We hear a lot of moaning, banging on about how you would like to see decreases and placing control on cost of living pressures, but there have been no reform measures and no ideas at all.
The government have been very cognisant, particularly since the global financial crisis, about how we manage our own revenue lines. Indeed, this budget is another example of that. We accept that we have to make savings, and those savings are almost entirely found within government. We are not asking the community to foot the bill, despite being able to provide to the community extra services and new initiatives in this budget.
Every time we consider our revenue lines in the budget, every time we consider a new budget initiative, we weigh that up and consider that in the context of what people can afford, where our own revenue effort is sitting at and whether there are any opportunities to increase or decrease our own revenue lines within the context of the budget. All of that is done as part of standard budget deliberations.
Yes, prices are going to go up, and I think the challenge for government is, where you can have influence, how you cushion the impact of those increases for the people that need it the most. I accept it is not just the most vulnerable who should be eligible for government assistance. We constantly need to upgrade and improve on our own data collection to make sure that our own concession regime are targeting all of those in need of extra support and assistance from the government. Indeed, one of the priorities outlined yesterday for the government is to streamline and update the concessions regime to make sure it is constantly updating and renewing the data so that we are providing the most modern support that we can to families and families in need.
They will not just be the families captured in the public housing criteria and they will not just be families covered by emergency housing or emergency government assistance or who have links with community services. We understand that. There are people who are holding down jobs and who are paying rents who are finding life hard with all of the cost increases. That is where the government has a range of programs that are targeted to meet the needs of individual families, and Minister Corbell’s program around energy efficiency for private renters is a classic example of that. We are extending government support and assistance into an area where we have not traditionally provided it in the past.
The amendment I have circulated, again, as I said earlier, puts the context around the issue a little bit more than the Liberal Party are prepared to do. We also note that the ACT government will apply the triple bottom line analysis on all major policy proposals, including all budget initiatives from August this year. We will continue to
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