Page 2579 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 10 August 2016
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Do you get any of this when you listen to the Canberra Liberals? No. You get none of it. It is all negative. Unfortunately, the Canberra Liberals choose negativity over positivity every time. Everything the Canberra Liberals do and say in this Assembly is based largely on what they will not do. Again I point to Mr Hanson’s speech, over half of it dedicated to light rail.
Mr Hanson and his Treasury spokesperson, Mr Coe, want to cancel the light rail contract, risking our gold star credit rating and our gold star unemployment levels. The cost of stage 1 of light rail is affordable. The cost of cancelling the light rail contract is not. Cancelling light rail in Canberra will cost up to $300 million and contribute to a $400 million black hole. For that money, Canberrans will get nothing. Businesses will get nothing. But the ACT’s credit rating will get something; it will get a downgrade. The Canberra Liberals have created a $400 million black hole, and cancelling light rail is a significant portion.
Where is $400 million worth of savings coming from? We believe that the Canberra Liberals will have to slash public service jobs to find them. Sadly, this comes as no surprise. Recent form from the opposition leadership has suggested that ACT public servants are expendable. They have consistently attacked the integrity of the ACT public service and talked down the great work they do. If elected, you can be sure they will commission an audit and cut jobs—just like their counterparts Tony Abbott and Campbell Newman. Don’t think it can’t happen here in Canberra.
Mr Hanson and his Treasury spokesperson, Mr Coe, simply cannot be trusted. The Canberra Liberals’ second-choice Treasury spokesperson is clearly out of his depth if he thinks spending $300 million tearing up contracts will give him more money to invest in services.
Light rail will transform Canberra and boost our economy. Cancelling it would send Canberra businesses and the ACT economy into freefall and cost our city 3,500 jobs. I think that is what the Canberra Liberals want for Canberra. Last week we learned that not only do they want to cancel the contract; they also want to try to rescope it, whatever that means. Mr Coe suggested to the Canberra Times that this would mean asking the light rail consortium to build roads, education or health infrastructure instead of the light rail they are contracted to build. Let that sink in, Madam Speaker. The Canberra Liberals want Deutsche Bahn, the second largest transport company in the world and the largest railway operator and infrastructure owner in Europe, to build, say, a school. That plan was rightly ridiculed by experts, with University of Canberra infrastructure financing expert Professor Cameron Gordon saying that such an idea was impractical and unprecedented—in fact, that he had never seen it. This puts comments from the federal Liberals about the Canberra Liberals’ position being economic lunacy in sharp focus.
Let me move to today’s motion. It seems that Mr Coe’s thought bubble about rescoping the contract has forced Mr Hanson to take over the reins again, since today he is moving this motion about light rail. It seems he no longer has confidence in his Treasury spokesperson or his transport spokesperson—no confidence in the man who one week wants to cost ACT taxpayers $300 million by cancelling light rail and then
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