Page 3472 - Week 08 - Thursday, 23 August 2012
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The report right now would be a short one. How many over-the-counter sales do we have? Zero. None. After 11 years. These are the basics. You should be able to get this right. You have got control over it. You have control over the settings, you have control over ACTPLA and you have control over the Land Development Agency. Yet what do they do? They stall.
You have to ask how much of this is deliberate profiteering from the government at the expense of first homebuyers—how much of this is gouging first homebuyers in order to prop up their budget bottom line. It is false economy; it is poor economics. But it is also putting a massive burden on Canberra families.
In the time I have left, I will briefly mention the government office block, because it was in this area. It was in the Economic Development Directorate that the tales were spun—that we were told all sorts of weird and wonderful things to justify this government office block which is not going ahead. I will simply make a couple of points on that.
If the government is not going to tell the truth on the biggest infrastructure project it has ever proposed, what can it be trusted on? If it is going to make up numbers like a $34 million saving, which it walked away from and does not believe in, what else is it not telling the truth about? What else is this minister not telling the truth about? What else is the Chief Minister not telling the truth about?
Millions of dollars were wasted. That is taxpayers’ money; that is taxpayers’ money that has been wasted. They told the community porkies about a process in order to back up their own claim. Their own claim was that we needed this government office building, that it needed to be built and owned by the government. They spent millions of dollars. They made up the figures. They claimed $34 million in savings and then walked away from it because they were not telling the truth. If they were telling the truth, if they were going to save $34 million a year, they would not have walked away from it.
In the brief time I have left, I acknowledge members of the southern electorate branch in the gallery, particularly Nicole Lawder, one of our wonderful candidates for Brindabella, with such a fantastic background. I welcome them here to the chamber tonight.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (9.21): I rise just to reflect on the narrative around suburbs such as Throsby that Mr Seselja has set forth on again. I think it is of concern—and my remarks are similar to remarks I made earlier about that—that he is always taking it one step too far. I think in an area like Throsby what the Greens asked for when we talked about it in this place was for it to be assessed under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. That act was passed during John Howard’s prime ministership. That act sets up protection for areas of national environmental significance. The fact that Throsby qualified under that seems to be of great concern to Mr Seselja, who would preferably concrete the entire area. I think that it is unhelpful to draw out these narratives of extremism that Mr Seselja so readily resorts to.
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