Page 645 - Week 02 - Thursday, 18 February 2016
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that we are running out of land. This is the government that is addicted to land revenue. That is what they are about. It is a land-based economy; it is a land-based budget. It is only as good as the next sale. One could almost think they have deliberately mismanaged land release to prop up prices in a failed attempt to balance their budget.
All of this continually adds to cost of living, and that is before we get to the tram. We have seen the growth in rates. Rates will triple. They are well and truly on their way to tripling, as we predicted. As their own document, the Quinlan review, says, they must triple to make up for the removal of conveyancing. As we have always said, we think that is a price that too many Canberrans cannot afford.
But in all of this, if you thought there was a dividend you might say, “Well, okay.” But go back to the other questions that have been asked this week—the smells from the tip, the look of the city, homes in the suburbs with containers and skips, the cracked footpaths, the cracked roads, the dead trees, the long grass—this is not a city that is being well managed by any of those opposite, and it is certainly not a city that the people of Canberra are paying for. They pay large amounts of rates, large amounts of duty and they get less and less from this government.
We then get to the tram. Mr Barr for some years has been chasing the illusionary surplus. I think the first year it was meant to arrive was 2013-14. It has now been pushed out to 2017-18. It just keeps getting pushed out. It is just one more year. Every budget a couple more years are added, and that is before we add on the cost of delivering the tram.
Just in raw terms, if you said there is a $698 million tram and there are 151,000 households, that is about $4,500 per household. That is the cost of just the capital of stage 1 without the availability payment, which of course, despite the good work of Mr Coe in attempting to find out what that will be, the government refuses to tell us. We even asked for an indication. “Just give us a round number. Put us in the ballpark.” But the government refuses to tell the people of the ACT. What they told the people before the last election was that they would do the preliminary work and they would spend $30 million.
It is even harder to get a number on the total spend. What is the spend in TAMS and other organisations that are propping this up? What we do know, though, is that they intend to go ahead full steam, at great expense to the people of the ACT. There is no real plan. There is a document now. Most people would normally say, “Here is the broad plan. We have done the feasibility on this. We have chosen this route for a reason.” Instead we had the $600 million bit of pork barrelling. Mr Rattenbury’s vote had to be acquired, and it is the biggest barrel of pork ever purchased certainly in the history of the ACT, and may well be, for a single vote, the biggest bit of pork in the history of Australian budgeting.
But there it is. It is on the table. But we do not know the full cost. We do not know how long this will take. We do not know what that will mean as it comes down to individual households, and we do not know what it will do to the delivery of other services in the ACT. We all know that Mr Corbell’s last major project was the disaster
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