The year began with Katy Gallagher, mother of three, an empathetic leader, and from the party's left, as chief minister. It ended with Andrew Barr in the top job – social progressive, economic conservative, the country's first gay leader of any jurisdiction, a member of the right, more bullish in attitude than his predecessor, and beginning in hard hat and fluoro vest declared "our job is jobs".
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The year began with the city's 1021 Mr Fluffy homeowners receiving a letter warning about the asbestos contamination in their homes. It ended with a decision to spend $1 billion in a mass demolition – an unthinkable result in April when the then minister Simon Corbell declared demolition simply not possible.
How quickly things change in politics.
The extent of the political turnaround in 12 months will be leaving Labor edgy and uncertain just past the halfway point of its term. The questions for Mr Barr will be whether he can deal with a horror deficit without a painful squeeze on spending and a electorally damaging hike in rates, fees and charges, and whether he can turn the Gungahlin tramline into a political positive.
The question for his opponent Jeremy Hanson is whether he can weave the political magic of Kate Carnell and find an issue sufficiently progressive to convince Canberrans he doesn't lead a party simply of self-interested businesspeople and social conservatives out of step with the city's mainstream – and whether he has the skills to bring the moderates of the Menzies Group, creating such trouble on the edges, into the fold.
It's been a year of big news, and not much of it good news, for this long-standing Labor government.
If the government didn't know at the beginning of the year just how difficult a sell light rail was going to be, it will be left in no doubt by now. The apparent lack of support within the bureaucracy won't be helping, and showed its hand with the leaking of the rapid business case in May. This was an explosive document, revealing that the project leaders questioned the viability of the full 12-kilometre line from Gungahlin, saying the strongest case could be made for a three kilometre line from Exhibition Park to the city, which more easily met the "passenger intensity" needed to make the tram a viable alternative to bus. The government rejected the suggestion, determined to push ahead with the full 12 kilometres, and by the time the full business case was released at the end of October all mention of passenger intensities, put forward in the rapid business case as a standard measure of viability, was gone.
No mention either of the whimsical ideas of turning Exhibition Park and the race course into a suburban business park, with "large campus-style uses", university and technology facilities, "hotel or serviced accommodation, private hospitals, place of worship (for example, Hillsong) and indoor recreational facilities". Hillsong! Its inclusion defies understanding and the catch-all nature of this document did nothing to boost confidence in the way governments make big decisions.
The transformation of Northbourne Avenue into a hub of high-density living and activity has become the cornerstone of the government's justification of the tram, although stated rather more bluntly in the rapid business case that recommended the government make decisions "that deliberately favour it over other precincts across the ACT".
This is the rub for people living south of the lake, where the Liberals have their strongest membership, and where their chances of government will depend on them taking the third seat in each of the two southern electorates. This explains Gallagher's elevation of Tuggeranong's Mick Gentleman to the ministry this year to join fellow Tuggeranong minister Burch. The Cabinet posts for that pair have as much to do with raising the Labor profile in the southern seat as anything else.
The government has also spent the year tying itself in syntactical knots over the cost of the tram, after Gallagher insisted cabinet would only approve a project of $614 million, the 2011 figure, adjusted to today's dollars – a declaration that no doubt had the people charged with delivering the project banging their heads gently on a wall somewhere – and had everyone else turning to their calculators. In 2014 dollars, $614 million becomes about $670 million, assuming a 3 per cent annual inflation rate. But Simon Corbell had more to add, telling us it should be adjusted to 2019 dollars when operations begin. Which brings the price to $760 million, much closer to the $783 million eventually settled on. None of those figures include the cost of searching for underground pipes and wires, or the shared cost between government and private partner of dealing with those pipes and wires. Nor the cost of running the Capital Metro agency.
The next 18 months will see clarity on costs when we find out just how much the government will pay the private consortium over 20 years to build and operate the line. That figure will be front and centre in the 2016 election campaign. But it won't be the only figure haunting the Barr Labor government. The other is the deficit.
The deficit news was bad in June when the ACT Budget was released with a forecast deficit of $333 million this year, a deterioration of more than $200 million on the previous forecast. Now, you can add $600 million over two years, this year and next, to pay for the Mr Fluffy buyback and demolition. Other than indicating a $600 million deterioration, the government hasn't released its updated deficit figure – that will come in January with the mid-year update, but it's clearly worse than half a billion dollars in the red, and probably much worse. It's not an easy number to go into the 2016 election on the back of, and gives Mr Barr zero flexibility for budget feel-good measures.
Along with the tram, Mr Fluffy has been the defining issue of 2014. Some of the 1021 owners are now turning their anger and frustration on Fluffy campaigner Brianna Heseltine, but without Heseltine the mass buyback and demolition would not have happened. (Canberra Times reporter Emma Macdonald is the other early hero of getting this cause on the public agenda.)
Remember, Corbell was ruling out demolition in April, saying it would be prohibitively expensive and not necessary, an assessment echoed then by Work Safety Commissioner Mark McCabe. How fast things change.
It took the relentless advocacy of Heseltine to persuade families to tell these stories, to threaten and prepare a class action, and to confront politicians with her searingly direct and extraordinarily persuasive style (and bravery in going public in the first place on her Fluffy status). The Commonwealth gave the ACT a lesson on how not to let the snowball gather pace and bulk by refusing all media on the subject – which allowed Senator Eric Abetz to get away with announcing no federal help whatsoever other than allowing the ACT to access its cheaper loan interest rates. At the same time, as the months had dragged on, the issue had gathered such momentum locally that Gallagher could not get away with the same non-response; she really had no choice, but to announce a financially crippling, and emotionally and technically momentous decision to buy and demolish 1021 homes.
This will test the government on every level over the next five years as the program rolls out, and will require the closest hand on demolition, disposal and remediation to ensure the safety of all Canberrans, not just the Fluffy families. Asbestos disease has a long lag time, and for half a century to come the Fluffy legacy will play itself out with the eventual hope that health authorities will be able to come to a conclusion about the health impacts of 50 years of Mr Fluffy asbestos, since it was installed in the late 1960s and early 1970s to its final removal now.
The obvious change with the shift from Gallagher to Barr is the extra emphasis Barr will put on economic development – on partnerships with the private sector and business incentives – and perhaps more stridently imposed increases in taxes and fees. Already this year, he's upset, perhaps, 1000 contract workers in Canberra by bringing them into the payroll tax net, an initiative he was forced to delay after the full impact on their pay packets became clear, and he's upset everyone with an investment unit of a big increase in land tax.
The relentlessly sensible Gallagher appeared to have a steadying hand in government and whether the new leadership team of Barr and his deputy Corbell can keep a lid on excess and hubris remains to be seen. Barr has never known the terrible humility of opposition; he's been a minister since the moment he walked into politics. Corbell has seen more. He entered the Assembly when Carnell led a Liberal government and spent nearly five years in opposition until Jon Stanhope finally led Labor back into government, putting behind it years of destructive factional infighting and disunity.
We can assume leadership stability in the lead up to the 2016 election; whether we can assume sensible decision-making is less clear. The fast-track planning laws will go down as one of the debacles of 2014 and a worrying sign of a government too long in power to the point where proper process is just an annoying detail to be pushed aside. For the Greens, the message was worse. Corbell introduced the planning laws at the end of March and hoped to have them through the Assembly within a couple of weeks, in a whirlwind piece of lawmaking that blindsided the public. The laws were to allow the government to declare special precincts and major projects that would be effectively exempt from normal planning laws, exempt from tree protection and heritage laws, with no rights of appeal. They were designed to smooth the way for the tram, but were an extraordinary attempt to concentrate power in the hands of the government and truncate consultation, public input and appeals. Determination to deliver the tram line appeared to have blinded the government to reasonableness in lawmaking. The Greens' Shane Rattenbury supported the laws with a mildness and utter lack of alarm that looked at best naive, given the way it eliminated tree protection and heritage protection. As the only Green voice in the Assembly, he will need to tread more cautiously in the lead-up to the election. The government saw its error and withdrew the laws, but it remains unclear whose error of judgment they were.
Corbell is also minister for renewable energy and this is largely a very big success story for the government. He is a man of undoubted vision and ambitious planning – and has spearheaded a policy that sees the ACT Government on its way to having 90 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, including funding large-scale solar and wind farms. The results of the wind auction have yet to be announced, but it looks likely to follow solar in delivering the taxpayer renewable energy at very good prices – the keen competition in the large-scale auctions has encouraged renewable companies to bid as low as they can, and as long as they can sustain their businesses over the 20-year project term – it's all good news. Well, almost.
One of those solar farms is caught in a bitter planning dispute because the proponent, Elementus Energy, saw fit to site it directly across the road from the Uriarra village. That decision is difficult to fathom. Clearly being close to the road makes it cheaper for Elementus, but there was plenty of land available to the company further back on the block, and any cost saving is surely annulled by the delays in planning, and the very significant ill will it is creating with its neighbours. For Corbell, solar should be all good news. How did he let it turn into bad?
If the tenor of the Barr-Corbell government is yet to be seen, so, too, is the effect of the move to 25 members at the 2016 election. The next six months will see electorate boundaries being settled for the move from three electorates to five, then the major parties will begin a frantic period of pre-selection to find teams of 25 candidates each to fight the election.
Other members of the Assembly dealt with their share of bad news in 2014.
The year began with Arts Minister Joy Burch forced to defend a Nazi stripper parody act at the fringe festival, a cameo act that had an equally surreal follow up later in the year, when the director of the controversial Fringe, Jorian Gardner, joined the Sex Party and now shows most often campaigning on the subject of medical marijuana.
Burch faced calls for her resignation, Hanson criticising the appointment of Gardner to the role without a tender, and his attacks were renewed in when in May it emerged that Burch had been warned that aspects of the festival program might challenge audiences and be suitable only for adults.
Liberals Giulia Jones and Vicki Dunne courted controversy in March for a three-week study tour on prostitution laws to France, Sweden and South Korea. After the $35,000 tour, paid for by the taxpayer, they called for better co-operation between local police and federal agencies to combat trafficking of women for sex in Australia, and for exit programs to help women leave the sex industry.
But perhaps the longest lasting result of the trip was a crackdown on travel entitlements for territory politicians. Jones ignored the recommendation of Assembly Clerk Tom Duncan not to take a staff member on the tour, promoting the Remuneration Tribunal to hasten its decision to abolish taxpayer-funded study tours and spousal travel for members of the Legislative Assembly. Dunne's husband also went on the trip.
For all the political headaches, a real tragedy also hit the Assembly hard this year. In August, Kurt Steel, a well-respected and popular adviser to Barr, was killed in a bus crash during a holiday in Bolivia.
The 25-year-old, remembered in a packed service at the Canberra Theatre, was a much loved member of the ACT Labor Party, a young man considered to have a future in politics, and with a smile and cheeriness that made people he worked among smile straight back at him.
