Page 2268 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 3 August 2016

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The Greens, I think it is well known, want to see a transition to a clean, green economy—and it helps achieve climate change targets—as we believe that a shift to a low carbon economy will deliver the greatest economic benefits to the territory. To get there I think we need to see better collaboration of the public and private sectors to fully transition the ACT to a low carbon economy.

I understand that the focus of Mr Wall’s motion today is largely about small and medium enterprises. That is certainly what I took from his remarks. Certainly his media release this afternoon particularly implied that. The Greens fully understand the important role that these businesses play in the ACT economy. We agree that simpler government processes, charges and regulations are important to reduce compliance costs and administration, particularly for small business.

However, whenever these motions come up, raised by those opposite, we never really see any substantial proposals to back them up. I do not know what the particular changes are—and obviously I will come back to that in a moment—but outside that, what are the specific issues that are being raised? We have Access Canberra in place with a continuing program of red tape reduction, particularly focused on how to help our local businesses. Those reforms have been progressively passed in the Assembly over the past few years. If there are particular ideas, then they should be given over for Access Canberra to get on with implementing so that we can actually make these improvements in a concrete way.

Certainly I have also supported the proposal to establish a local industry advocate, a position inaugurally held by Kate Lundy, which I believe is playing an important role in working to improve local procurement and support local businesses. The Greens certainly believe it is important that local and small businesses be able to compete fairly in providing goods and services to the territory and federal governments.

Government procurement decisions are certainly very important to support the local and regional economy, and I am pleased that we now have in place policies that give weighting to social enterprises and local companies. This is something that I believe the local industry advocate is also monitoring. We also want to see better use of local supply chains to support the regional community because, of course, we all know that Canberra, whilst a city in its own right, when we think about the region slightly more broadly, really is a hub in a network. That is something we should never lose sight of in these sorts of discussions. The Greens would like to see the ACT government work more closely with the regional business sector to enable it to be responsive to economic challenges such as climate change and food security and improve environmental and social outcomes.

I turn to the issue of LVC, which Mr Wall spoke of and on which I think Mr Barr made some very good comments. We recognise that there is a concern about the LVC. When it was being changed in 2011 we tried to balance the competing factors to respond to industry concerns and come up with a solution that continues to make infill an attractive commercial option whilst at the same time ensuring that the community gets a fair return.


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