Page 2975 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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We recognise that we do need to make savings. As I said, everyone agrees all directorates should be as efficient as reasonably possible but there must logically come a time when targeted measures, which I acknowledge are being explored, need to play a larger role, and this task will ultimately fall on Treasury to identify and assist directorates in implementing them.
Economic management is the next output that I need to address, and broadly speaking the first observation that should be made is that economic forecasts have been found by AC1L Tasman to appear reasonable. By all traditional thinking, these forecasts, whilst they are falling from this financial year, remain relatively positive. But I would make the point that the Greens think that we should move beyond these measures and we need a better and more comprehensive way of measuring our prosperity. Growth cannot be infinite—we live in a finite world—and whilst I understand we could not expect Treasury to have grappled with this issue just yet, the first step that we could look to straight away is to measure income distribution in the economic measures that we publish in the budget papers. Employment growth is one thing but I hope we would agree that the more qualitative measure is how that income is distributed across the community.
It is probably appropriate here to reflect on the impact of the commonwealth and our vulnerability to commonwealth expenditure decisions. Again the response to this has to be that we need to encourage private sector activity in the green economy. We need to acknowledge the reality that we are the seat of government and we are subject to the whim of the commonwealth. Nevertheless we can create other industries and employment opportunities. Unlike other cities, this is an additional impetus for creating new, low-emissions employment for Canberrans in the green economy, and a swift transition will protect us against the inevitable rising costs as the age of cheap energy ends and will protect us into the future from commonwealth expenditure reductions.
We do need to be realistic about the time frame. We are primarily a service-based economy and this is a real advantage. Education and training are a significant part of our economy and something we should always be looking to build on. We do have a small and valuable manufacturing sector and I think we should be realistic about the capacity that it has to increase in size dramatically. And I will come back to some other—(Time expired.)
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (11.51): It is worth reflecting in this line item on the fact that tomorrow is 1 July. Tomorrow is the day when the Labor Party impose more tax increases on the people of Canberra. It is going to be another example of a government that do not care about the cost of living of Canberra families. I think there is no doubt that the Labor Party, the Labor government in the ACT and their Greens coalition partners, do not have regard to the cost of living pressures on Canberra families. It is seen through their policies and it will be reflected tomorrow as Canberra families are again being forced to pay more and more and more
If Kevin Rudd was here he would probably call tomorrow fundamental injustice day. Of course, what he referred to as fundamental injustice day was tax reform—some
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