In this election year, ACT Opposition Leader Brendan Smyth is not in despair and he is not a defeatist.
The Legislative Assembly meets for its first 2004 session next week. He dismisses recent polling that puts him in the mid 20s and Chief Minister Jon Stanhope in the mid to high 70s with the cliché that there is only one poll that counts.
“The only poll that counts is the poll on the day and I have got eight months to prove that I can do it,” he said in an interview this weak.
He points out – quite pertinently – that there has been no independent polling, so who knows.
But any sane assessment must have him at very long odds up against a popular Chief Minister who in the eyes of the electorate has avoided any bungle or scandal. You feel like saying, “Brendan, the October election in the ACT is an abattoir for the Liberal Party; you are going to get slaughtered.”
The Liberals have got another problem: none of the three Liberals elected in the key central seat of Molonglo will still be in the race come October. Pleading to some high-profile prospects to stand has been met with little success. On the other hand, Labor in Molonglo has three fairly high profile Ministers. Where the Liberals are perhaps strongest, with two higher profile candidates – in Ginninderra – they face Jon Stanhope.
Smyth admits that he has not got traction and that he suffers from a lack of profile. He will not directly attack the media for failing to expose weaknesses in the Government or failing to give his team any credit for exposing government weaknesses, but it is a sub-text.
He cites the fact that the Liberals in effect defeated three Labor taxes: the bushfire levy, the security duties levy, and Treasurer Ted Quinlan’s “inequitable” rates system. But he did not think people knew or acknowledged it.
He is also up against a first-term government. Smyth points out that in recent history only one state-level government has not got a second term.
“There is an Australian attitude that they’re just learners with their L-plates on,” Smyth says. “The attitude says give them a go and we will turf them out next time. My challenge is to turf them this time, and it is a big hurdle to cross.”
Sure is, when the voter perception is that the Government has handled the bushfires well, when the Chief Minister has high popular acclamation, particularly after the Bendora Dam incident, and when the perception is that the Government has been steady and consultative.
But Smyth thinks that, if he can get a decent run at explaining the Government’s weaknesses to people, he has a show.
He says he has a serious indictment against the Government: all plans and no action; lost opportunity; indecisiveness and financial imprudence.
He is scathing and dismissive of the Government’s big three plans: the spatial plan, the economic white paper and the social plan.
“The Government’s weakness is no original thought,” he says. “If you look at the White Paper, if you look at the social plan, if you look at the spatial plan, they are . . . statements of the bleeding obvious.
“They are just core government business. If you look at the objectives of the social plan, they are all just the obvious core business of government: reduce the level of poverty, reduce the level of long-term unemployed, improve a life expectancy and so on. There is nothing here to say we have got a better way of doing things.
“Then there is the lack of decisiveness. They have released their social plan but they haven’t told us what they will do and when or which bits are funded. It all has to go through the budget process.
“This was the same excuse with the economic white paper. They said ‘we are committed to this’, but there are no bucks now. . . .
“What we have got in effect is a three-year malaise. . . . They have wasted two years planning for what they might do in the next term with the assumption that they will have a majority government.”
As a result, the ACT has missed crucial opportunities, according to Smyth. He cites the convention centre, the prison, Gungahlin Drive, tourism, information technology, relationships with China and South Africa and the national zoo.
“The present Convention Centre is not good enough,” he says. “But the Government has dilly-dallied.
“The convention market works three to four years out,” he says. “If there is a problem now with the convention centre we will be losing money for two to three or four years.
“The report we [the former Liberal Government] got in March 2001 said that without a new convention centre over the next 10 years you will lose $1.7 billion. So we are losing $170 million the year from here on in.
“What have we got? No decision. No activity. And if they started today it would be two years before we got a new convention centre and we will not get the business in the meantime. . . .
“The prison is another example of lost opportunity. They have taken two years to come up with a site which they have done no work on. They blame the Federal Government. In not asking the federal government for land two years ago they have effectively set back the project two years.
“The National Zoo is another example. [The zoo] has been asking for a block of land for two years. And what has the ACT Government been doing? Nothing. And they just blame the Federal Government, but it is not the Federal Government’s fault. . .
“We are yet to get their mental health strategy. Two years into this Government’s term we do not know what they’re going to do with mental health. So how can anyone judge them except by the results which saw 19 deaths of individuals in 20 months under the care of ACT Mental Health . . . .?
“Nothing has been done to capitalise on Canberra Connect [the body set up by the previous Government to encourage hi-tech industry in Canberra].
“All we have is complacency and an aversion to making decisions.”
Smyth’s task this year is to persuade voters that this indictment should stick.
He says, “I think Jon did a good job on the bushfires. On the face of it people would say, ‘Jon you have done a good job’. But the bushfires are just one incident. People now want to know about health and law and order.
“Luck has something to do with it. Jon happened to be there when the helicopter crashed and to his credit he did the right thing and dove in and helped. All credit to him for what he did, but when you get back to it, [then NSW Premier] John Fahey tackled the mugger just before the NSW election and gave the old lady back her handbag, and even after winning the Olympics people looked at it a different way and he got the flick.
“So I hope people will take Jon and I on our record and what it is we are offering. And we will be pointing out to the public the lack of activity of this Government.”
Smyth warns of a looming fiscal crisis which will result in higher taxes and charges.
“They left us a $344 million operating loss; we left them a sound position,” he says. “The ACT is now at the top of the cycle, but instead of putting money away in good times for later bad times, they are spending all the money. They budgeted a deficit at the top of the cycle. When the property boom ends, how will they be able to fund things at the rate they have been doing? “The answer is they can’t do it. They either must cut services, which no one likes, or they will raise taxes. It is a big-spending, big-taxing Labor Government. People do not want that.
“We should have cash reserves, but they have squandered it all. They have spent more than $500 million more than budgeted for in the past three years. That should have either been put away or put into capital works.”
He admits the Liberals wasted the first year of this term, “shooting ourselves in the foot” over what to do about rebel MLA Helen Cross. She left the Liberals to become an independent. The party was also in a hiatus over whether then leader Gary Humphries would go to the Senate.
And the bushfires have dominated the second year.
“But that is now clearing,” Smyth says, “And the things which we have been talking about: mental health; health; the hospital in the lowest 10 per cent in the national satisfaction survey; law and order; and education, are coming to the fore.
“Burglaries have tripled in Gungahlin. The ACT has 48 fewer cops than at January last year, despite Government claims that numbers are level.
“Forty-one per cent of ACT high school students do not go to a government high school. What is happening in government high schools that is causing parents to abandon the government system? This Government is not meeting parents’ needs for their children.”
So what would the Liberals do in Government?
“I think our strength is that we are dedicated to doing something,” he says. “We are not going to tell the people what we might do; we will take to the people of Canberra a list of things that we will do.
“We will have an agenda to run it straight away. The Government is here to lead and make decisions and not to waste time and hold the city back. . . .
“We have already said we will double the funding for tourism. We have said we will build the dragway. We will place an emphasis on law and order. We have already started putting out our policies. We will have them out early. We want a policy debate because we will beat them on a policy debate.
“Our weakness is that we are in opposition. We lack resources and lack the staff that the government has. We have six MLAs and 15 staff, and they have got 16,000 public servants, so we have got to work harder and we have got to work smarter. . . .
“My strength first and foremost is that I am a Canberra and I love the city and I want to see my city go forward. I have got things that drive me. My kids will be leaving school and I want to make sure they have got a job.
“My other strength is that I am not afraid of hard work. I do not knock off at 5 o’clock. And we have very much got a nine-to-five government and you cannot run government like that.”
The election is in 252 days’ time.