Page 1795 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 2 May 2012
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nominal contribution of private sector employment in our economy and over the mid-term an increase in the proportionate share of private sector employment. You have already lost 4,000 jobs over the last decade against the population growth that has occurred in that period. But now you have suddenly discovered the private sector: “Goodness me, there are jobs in the private sector.” We will see. It also says:
an increase in the rate of contact and engagement of local businesses and entrepreneurs to the ACT Government’s innovation, trade and investment program environment …
Get out and talk to them! If you actually paid attention, listened to them and talked to them you would not need that as some sort of indicator. You should be talking to them all the time.
The problem here is it is just another document from the government, from a government that has produced so many documents. We only need to go back to Mr Quinlan’s “statement of the bleeding obvious”, the economic white paper. It had nine strategic sectors. We have killed off four of the strategic sectors. We have gone down to five. Mr Quinlan had something like 47 recommendations. There is not a great deal of recommendations here. There is nothing that is particularly new.
What is not new is the lack of commitment. What is not new is the way that this government behaves towards business. Yes, business welcomes this and it is great that at last the government has used the word “diversification” in a positive sense. That is about the biggest outcome in this. But the proof of the pudding will be in the detail. As Chris Faulks says, she is looking forward to seeing the detail. The business community is looking forward to the action. And I think the population of the ACT is looking to the dividend that will come from the benefits of the private sector growing in the ACT instead of being nobbled as it has been over the last 11 years by this Labor government.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (12.02): I am very pleased Ms Porter brought forward this motion today because business, as both the Liberal and Labor Party have said, is an important part of the Canberra economy. If nothing else it would be an incredibly boring city if everyone worked in the public service. But there are other reasons as well for having a private sector, such as its resilience. It enables us to grow, it enables us to have jobs which are appropriate for people and that are not just all public service jobs, it enables us to function as a real city.
I have to agree with Mr Smyth’s comments that what we need in a business strategy is a lot more detail and some idea of what the funding actually is. I imagine what is happening is that we are waiting for the budget, so we will actually have two announcements of the same program. I guess that has some PR advantages but it is a bit frustrating to see a document which may have a lot more in it—or may have a lot less in it—than is clear from what is written in it.
Going through Ms Porter’s motion, clearly the strategy was released and it is focusing on jobs growth, economic growth and diversification of the Canberra economy. These days we need to look at more than just jobs growth and economic growth. We need to
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