Page 1921 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 14 May 2013
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the time that they cannot get money from the banks. The banks, we understand, are willing to lend, but developers cannot get the money because the lease variation charge can make a development not viable.
The problem is that you have sown the roots of our destruction. That is what you have done. This is your tax. It is impeding the market. If the market slows and if developments do not go ahead, what happens is that we will lose skills. Those skills will go to markets that are either heating up or are already hot, like northern Queensland or Western Australia. Indeed, I understand that the New South Wales market is starting to pick up and it is a very short trip up the highway to Sydney to get a job as a builder or a developer in Sydney. This is the benefit. You have put the brakes on through your tax.
We all suffer as a consequence of it. I think it is a shame that the minister does not take responsibility for what he has done. We have seen the Gillard-Swan litany of broken promises and lies. We have seen the drop in federal public service numbers through fiscal consolidation—the rest of us call it “cuts”. We have seen the incredible dampening effect of calling an election eight or nine months before that election was due. That has led to loss of confidence in the public service and it has led to a decrease in spending. People are just not making decisions because you have got a rudderless government not making decisions. You have got a rudderless government that just stumbles from disaster to disaster. That is what is contributing to the economic uncertainty here in the ACT.
Of course, you have got a government that does not have plans to address its bills. For instance, we know that superannuation liabilities in the December quarter were $7,680 million, 66 per cent of liabilities. That has gone up now to 67 per cent of liabilities. It has gone up to $7,700 million. In fact, it has gone up to $7,765 million. It is about time the Treasurer told the people the truth of the effects of his taxes, about his inability to manage the budget, about the inability of the government to live within their means, about the inability of the government to diversify the economy, about the inability of the government to grow the base of taxpayers who could reasonably provide employment and contribute revenue—ie, business—and about the inability of this government to deliver their capital works on budget, on time and on scope.
These are the failures of the government that led to the disaster that is the budget from this local Labor government. It is still seated with an enormous prediction, courtesy of the mid-year review, of a $362 million deficit—a near record deficit. We will see what the actual outcome is as we progress towards the federal election with the uncertainties increasing. We will hear later today what the budget is and we will see in the coming weeks what the effect of this is on confidence. We will feel the real legacy of six years of federal Labor and some 12 years of local Labor’s inability to deliver surpluses, inability to get the money into the bank, inability to deliver capital works on time, on budget and on scope and their inability to stimulate the economy in a real way such that people can get the benefits of a government instead of the burden of a government.
Yet again, this is a quarterly report that outlines the failures of the Treasurer, outlines the failures of the Gallagher government and really does not offer a great deal. It is
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