Page 201 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 13 February 2019
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Referring to the lessons learnt out of the business impact report, I would like to refer to lesson (d) greater certainty about timing and delays in constructions. The government can still not give a completion date, and businesses are still being left in limbo. Lesson (e) is working with landlords to hold rent prices during construction. Surely here there is a role for government to provide some help with negotiations.
I know of several businesses that have closed their doors, shut up shop, left the town centre, and with thousands and thousands of dollars of debt. This is a disgrace and here we have the opportunity to help those that remain but are close to the line. Instead, what does this government do? Nothing. It sits on its hands and uses spin to talk about marketing campaigns and future projects.
Lesson (f) is for better signage, fewer road closures and efforts to improve parking and accessibility. Surely, here again there are strategies the government could adopt to help promote foot traffic and patronage for local businesses. This stuff is not rocket science; it is basic town planning. And the government has failed residents in Yerrabi on this front time and again, and they are continuing to fail businesses by pretending it is not an ongoing issue.
This brings me to the last and probably most controversial of all the recommendations and lessons learnt, that is, (b) financial support and compensation for revenue loss. I am sure this is the one that scares the government the most, and I can understand that. Perhaps that is why the amendment put forward by Mr Steel is full of so much fluff and fails to mention anything about financial support. Providing compensation for a public infrastructure project could be a dangerous precedent. Why do I think it is justified in this case? Because the government had failed to properly protect and plan for the impact it would cause to businesses.
The light rail project had an environmental impact statement, of which barely two pages are dedicated to business. They rated the risk as so low that they did not make provisions to protect or promote business during construction. In fact, on page 50 of the EIS the risk to business is described as “low, not potentially significant”.
This makes it even harder to swallow the arguments being put forward today. Pretend all you like that businesses will benefit, but I am not convinced. And more to the point for this motion, you need to be doing more now. As I have argued time and again, asking people to hold on till the end, to put their houses and their livelihoods on the line, is unacceptable.
If the government believes they have delivered on the report from September last year, why have they not updated the Assembly or reported back on exactly what they have been doing to help businesses? Why? The answer is they have nothing meaningful to say and nothing practical to offer. Again, the amendment from Mr Steel only highlights that fact.
Where to now? I will go back out to the local traders and let them know the only real way to get action, to see change, is to vote for a Canberra Liberals government in 2020.
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