Page 2334 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 4 August 2021
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cuttings and photographs which assisted his writing. He wrote a number of articles and papers, the histories of 10 parishes, and two books.
Father Brian was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for Service to the Canberra Region through historical organisations, and the Catholic Church of Australia in 2009 and was appointed an archdiocesan historian in 2011.
It was with great pleasure that I attended the launch of the Brian Maher digital collection in April as part of the heritage festival. We certainly needed no reminding of just how popular family history research has become. The work of Canberra’s Heraldry and Genealogy Society in digitising Father Brian’s extensive records will make the search for many of the district’s older Catholic families so much easier, including my own, as I think I have reported before to this Assembly. Father Brian Maher was a relative and was always known to me as the “family historian”.
Vale Derek Wrigley and Brian Maher. Thank you for your different but important contributions to our community, to our history and to our future.
Municipal services—Charnwood shops
MR CAIN (Ginninderra) (4.45): Recently I came across a page on the Have Your Say government portal on the topic of the dangerous pavers at Charnwood shops. This is something I have brought to the attention of the minister several times and he has even appeared on television about it. The minister is well aware that this is an issue that local residents care about, so naturally this consultation page on the Have Your Say portal left me baffled. How hard can it be to fix a pavement?
A consultation about how to fix the paving will just prolong the current untenable situation. I encourage anyone to go to Charnwood shops and see all the white lines drawn across most of the entry area. They would realise that this is a bit of a farce. I understand that a longer-term solution needs to be put in place, but the government should just fix the broken and dangerous paving. I am highly supportive of consultation on big-picture, long-term issues that have a major effect on the community, but consultation on fixing broken paving seems a bit over the top. Charnwood locals deserve more than bureaucratic inertia. I have no doubt that they would rather see the pavement fixed than go through endless rounds of so-called community consultation.
I emphasise again that I am all for community consultation, but you do not need to consult on fixing broken paving. There is an effective and comprehensive way—that is, broader community consultation—to make sure services meet the mark. The Labor-Greens government probably should have directed their consultation activities towards, for example, their proposed closure of the green waste facility in West Belconnen. If they are going to consult on fixing broken paving, why not consult on something like that? It was only after an e-petition which I sponsored reached 2,000 signatures that the government changed its decision to end the lease at the end of June.
The pavement at the Charnwood shops, on the other hand, just needs fixing. The Labor-Greens government is doing an online survey and two pop-up sessions at the
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