17 June 2019

Coe tacks to the centre as he tries to rally Canberra's battlers to the Liberal cause

| Ian Bushnell
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Opposition Leader Alistair Coe: Try to present a new image for the Canberra Liberals.

Opposition Leader Alistair Coe: Trying to present a new image for the Canberra Liberals. File photo.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for Opposition Leader Alistair Coe as he used the ACT Budget to announce a couple of big policies to take to next year’s elections, but more importantly attempt to re-position the Canberra Liberals as the party of fairness and the forgotten.

The rates freeze grabbed the headlines but it’s the language that it and other issues have been couched in that reflect how the Canberra Liberals are preparing the electorate for a poll battle in which Chief Minister Andrew Barr will be demonised for the tax yoke imposed on the ACT’s battlers.

If you listen to Mr Coe these days, you’d think he had joined the Labor Party, not declared war on it. His speeches and interviews are peppered with phrases such as ‘doing it tough’, it’s just not fair’, and ‘justice and fairness’. He has attacked corporate largesse and greed, threatening to reduce Icon Water to a simple water authority run by public servants and slashing executive salaries.

He has even raised the issue of the working poor and the creeping poverty in affluent Canberra that afflicts 8000 children.

Social welfare activists will applaud the new bipartisanship and what some unkindly might say is the Canberra Liberals’ discovery of these issues.

It’s Mr Coe’s job to cast Mr Barr as an indifferent, out of touch Chief Minister leading a government that has been in power too long, is complacent and simply doesn’t care.

Rates are up way beyond the capacity of households to pay, they’re doing it tough and they need relief.

“It’s just not fair, there is a real justice and fairness element to what we are proposing today and we think we owe it to Canberra households to relieve the pressure,” Mr Coe told ABC radio.

He’s accused the Government’s tax policies for making Canberra too costly and driving young people in particular across the border in search of affordable real estate.

“We shouldn’t be pricing a generation of Canberrans out of this city,” he said. “We need to make sure that the ACT is affordable for everyone but it just seems that ACT Labor has forgotten about thousands of people in the ACT who are really part of the working poor.”

The forgotten people – that sounds vaguely familiar.

But you could hardly call Mr Coe and the Canberra Liberals Menzian, dominated as they are by a conservative right wing in the most socially progressive jurisdiction in the land.

The other pivot Mr Coe executed was to drop the Liberals’ longstanding and futile opposition to light rail and support in principle at least the line’s extension to Woden and other centres.

The Government remains sceptical but at least now the energy of stubborn opposition might be channelled into something more productive, if only to throw off the label of being stuck in the past.

With the Government lambasting the rates freeze proposal as irresponsible and claiming the Liberals would pay for it with massive cuts to services and jobs, including health, Mr Coe has been quick to frame Mr Barr and his left-wing allies as negative, and to reassure Canberrans.

“This is the sort of thing that Getup, the Labor Party, the CFMEU and unions in general run,” he said. “Unfortunately Andrew Barr is going to keep going with these negative campaigns.

“We’re far more committed to bringing justice and fairness to the tax regime in the ACT.”

He’s not in the business of cutting public servants. “We’d rather be hiring,” Mr Coe said.

He wants to ’empower’ them, whatever that means.

So, meet the new Alistair Coe, the new Canberra Liberals, battlers’ champions, public servants’ friend, more Labor than Labor.

But the questions about the details will keep coming, about how all the obvious inconsistencies about tax and spending can be reconciled, and about the baggage the Canberra Liberals still carry.

Yes, the Government is vulnerable on rates, property issues and its long time in office but it’s going to take a lot more than a change in tone, tax trucks and social media memes to dislodge Andrew Barr.

In the most educated electorate in the country, ACT voters will want the questions answered.

 

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The vacuity of most comments attacking Mr Coe are telling, as is, in its own way, former Labor Chief Minister Jon Stanhope’s reasoned assessment in the latest City News: No, the Federal Liberals have not cut grants to the ACT for health, education or anything else despite what the unionists and Labor faithful may be making up and/or repeating. And yes, the Barr government are nasty and vengeful towards anyone who crosses them. Finally, if you actually expect ACT Labor and the Greens to deliver ‘a fully functioning health system or an affordable house or a fair and progressive rates regime or justice for Aboriginal people, then dream on’.

Capital Retro11:58 am 19 Jun 19

“Looks like a used car salesman”

That’s a better look than the incumbent Chief Minister.

Capital Retro9:59 am 19 Jun 19

For whoever ends up running the ACT (Labor, Liberals or administrator/receiver) they will have to make massive cuts to staffing levels in the ACT public service if we are to survive.

Some of the salaries offered for jobs with esoteric descriptions are beyond belief. Do we really need 23,000 people to run Canberra?

angrycanberrian11:53 am 19 Jun 19

Yeah who needs the 4000 teachers, 6000 nurse’s, 1000+ doctors, all the act ambulance and act fire brigade, the ESA staff, bus drivers, the staff that administer public housing, the people who cut the grass and maintain trees that hang over roads. Or the people who fix pit holes or the people who make sure they get paid.

Capital Retro3:59 pm 19 Jun 19

We could integrate education, health and a few other directorates into the NSW system and that would eliminate a whole level of high paid bureaucrats. The functions in the Territory you mentioned that are carried out by councils elsewhere could be kept under Territory control.

Would you be happy with that?

HiddenDragon5:57 pm 18 Jun 19

“He’s accused the Government’s tax policies for making Canberra too costly and driving young people in particular across the border in search of affordable real estate.”

That view is shared by Jon Stanhope, who recently wrote –

“It is virtually impossible for a family with a gross household income of (say) under $110,000 and who cannot expect family support, to ever buy a detached house in Canberra. The government has effectively dictated that they must either live in a flat or leave the ACT. These are not the actions of a progressive government.”

It’s not the government that has dictated that people who cannot afford a detached house must leave or live in a flat, it is the market.

There are numerous detached houses that a family on $100k could afford if they so wished, just not in central areas nor near major transport corridors.

But his point just reflects market reality, poorer people can’t afford expensive things.

Looks like Stanhope is continuing with his bout of relevance deprivation syndrome.

Mr Bushnell seems to have overlooked the observation, from both Left and Right, following the recent federal election that clearly the Liberals are becoming the party of the working class, whilst Labor is becoming the retreat of the wealthy and the well-connected. Voters are seeing through the current ALP’s rhetoric. We’ll see next year if that translates well in the Canberra bubble.

The problem with the Stamp Duty shift is that Mr Barr didn’t actually adopt the model expert economists proposed. I’m OK for reducing Stamp Duty and increasing rates if the model was more equitable.

Solely basing the tax to cover government services around the per square metre value of land is disproportionately hitting many households.

Why should a single parent of one child in a house on a large block in Charnwood or Kambah be paying so much more in tax than a wealthy couple with an inner city townhouse, with amazing Government services, taxpayer funded public transport, high end community facilities and a property worth four times the outer city home?

Stamp Duty used to primarily tax the upwardly mobile who bought expensive houses, it has shifted the burden elsewhere and often onto the poorly serviced and less wealthy outer suburbs. That isn’t the efficient tax that economists talk about.

Stamp duty is widely regarded everywhere Australia wide as a terribly inefficient tax . It’s unreliable, its volatile, and it hits purchasers in one massive hit at the very start of home ownership… at a time when its already hard to save up a deposit- let alone thousands for stamp duty as well.

The fact the ACT Labor Government had the political guts to tackle a problem that is rife Australia wide, shows that Labor at least has a policy and a goal to improving tax revenue here in the ACT over the long term. Not just kicking short term political goals to win an election next year.

We are chugging along nicely… the envy of other states, even though the Liberal Federal Government tries their very best every year to rip public servants out of Canberra’s economy.
In spite of that, our economy is bucking the national trend of recession talk.

Getting rid of stamp duty is great for first home buyers and those stuck in the rental market. Yet Coe thinks Labor is squireling away money somewhere, and he’ll magically be able to come up with the millions of dollars required to fund rate cut “relief”.

From where Mr Coe?

If you are going to drop income, your expenses must also drop to balance the budget.
Labor is funding much needed improvements to services due to population growth with their current tax revenue… which services are you going to cut to fund your generous rate cuts?

And how exactly will those rate cuts prevent people from moving interstate?
Because I’m pretty sure first home buyers are more concerned with coming up with enough money to buy in the first place (when allowing for stamp duty), vs extra rates once they are already in.

Mike of Canberra11:25 am 18 Jun 19

Ian, you may not have noticed but the next ACT election is in October 2020, not this year. As such, now is not the time for the Liberals to be running a full campaign but rather establishing some themes on which to build their campaign as we get closer to the poll. To me, it’s hard to argue with what Coe says and, of course, I’ll be interested to hear more about what he believes a government led by him will look like. But to go throwing around the old right wing tag to suggest that there’s no scope for change is to subscribe to the theory that the ACT really has made itself a one-party state. Right wing they may be, but given how far to the left Barr and company have driven Canberra’s affairs, the Liberals now look positively centrist.

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