Page 5980 - Week 14 - Thursday, 8 December 2011
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spending. It is the families of Canberra who pay. We do not believe they should have to pay so much. We believe a good government will do all they can to try and keep costs down and deliver services well. This government do not do that, and we hear today why they do not do it: they do not care and they do not understand.
Andrew Barr, as Treasurer of the ACT, has expressed it: “They should be grateful because their land values have gone up. They should be grateful because their wages have gone up.” They have not gone up as much as this government continues to slug them. We are going to continue to fight for these families. We will continue to fight for them in opposition, and we want to come to government in 2012 and deliver to these people what they deserve. (Time expired.)
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (3.47): The same old broken record from across the road. It is interesting; I thought Mr Barr might shy away from Standard & Poor’s yesterday, because what Mr Barr does not tell this place, of course, is that the Australian Securities and Investments Commission—ASIC—is conducting an inquiry into rating houses, given some of the catastrophic failures in the lead-up to the global financial crisis. I think Standard & Poor’s—somebody can correct me if I am wrong—gave Lehman Brothers the highest rating it could possibly give for a bank the day before it collapsed.
It is interesting that Mr Barr goes to the rating houses. Perhaps he has not read the fact that ASIC is looking into this. One of the things ASIC is looking into is the conflict of interest that rating houses have because they get paid by organisations like governments to rate them. There is an internal conflict of interest—you have got revenue model conflicts, you have got ancillary business conflicts, and you have got analysis conflicts. In general, to their credit, research houses recognise the existence of conflict of interest in their businesses and have some processes to manage them. These processes vary substantially in their sophistication and emphasis.
Mr Barr forgot to tell the Assembly that little gem when he lauded the ratings report. But I think the general rating report, the general assessment of how well the ACT government is doing, is felt in the suburbs. It is felt by families. It is felt in their hip pockets and it is felt in the way that they respond to the cost of living pressures and their ability to pay their bills and their accounts to the government. This is something that Mr Seselja, to his credit, has made a significant issue. The government, after 10 years in office, has forgotten about the people that put it there. This government has run out of puff, and you can see it particularly in Mr Barr’s presentation today.
This is an important matter, because it is a sensitive and serious matter for just about everyone in the ACT, except for those that sit on the benches opposite and probably those that sit on the crossbench. Let us consider two components of the latest bulletin from the ABS on Australia’s national accounts. This is the detail that Mr Barr did go to, and I am pleased Mr Barr raised this as an issue. Let us firstly consider the analysis and the performance of households as shown by the households savings ratio. We are aware that for some time consumers have been more and more conservative in their approach to their spending and savings decisions, one, because a lot of people were injured by the global financial crisis and, two, because they are being stung constantly
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