Page 1936 - Week 06 - Thursday, 9 June 2016
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Firstly, as is evident, they are not delivering on the basics of good government. Schools are struggling, waiting lists are the worst in Australia, hospital beds are full and our bus network is neglected. Meanwhile our cost of living is skyrocketing.
Secondly, this government is focused on their own priorities and not those of mainstream Canberrans. While Mr Barr continues to support spending $1.65 billion on a tram simply to enable his power-sharing agreement with the Greens, the majority of the electorate are being left behind.
But in many ways, and most disturbingly, this government has about it the stench of nepotism and cronyism. After 15 years in power, the Barr government has become entangled in a series of suspect land deals, it has become addicted to pokies money, and it is corrupted by links to militant unions while it governs by means of secret backroom deals.
As the Canberra Times said in a recent editorial, this is “government by cronyism”. The CEO of the Council of Small Business recently wrote an editorial titled “Living in the crony capital”. Even former Labor Chief Minister Jon Stanhope has said publicly that the unions and factions have “corrupted the party”. He has called for an end to what he calls the rorting and has said that the Labor Party—and I quote, Madam Speaker, from the former Labor Chief Minister—has become a “plaything of a handful of union-based factional leaders”.
The Canberra Times editorial on 17 March called out Mr Barr’s secret deal with the unions, observing that, and I quote from the editorial:
The deal between the state government and UnionsACT just doesn't smell right.
The way the ACT is being governed today is in many ways reflective of Mr Barr’s factional Labor background—it is a government for the insiders, the Labor cronies and the factions. As the Canberra Times observed again this week in another editorial:
… many voters have concluded the inflexibility of thinking and disdain of criticism the Chief Minister Barr affects from time to time betrays a familiarity with power not wholly admirable nor indeed desirable.
And that is what we have now, and that is why we need change.
It is clear that Mr Barr and I are very different people with very different experiences and very different values. Mr Barr has risen through the Labor Party machine in Canberra as a political staffer. His experience does not extend much beyond local Labor factional politics and working in this Legislative Assembly.
My story is different, my values are different and my vision for the future is different. My background before politics of serving for 22 years in the army has given me a broader view of life. Indeed, my career took me all over Australia and throughout some of the most dangerous and underprivileged places in the world. It instilled in me the army’s values of respect, teamwork, courage and initiative. But more than that, my
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