Page 3546 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 23 November 2021
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As well as increasing Access Canberra’s capacity to provide timely regulatory outcomes, this funding will also support proactive reviews of engineering designs as part of audit functions to identify issues before buildings are occupied. More broadly, we know that Access Canberra staff play a vital role as the face of the ACT government. They have been, and continue to be, challenged during this pandemic and have responded in a simply extraordinary way, time and time again. They are an absolute credit to this government, and I cannot thank them enough for just how hard they work, how hard they have responded, and how much they have supported this community—and they continue to do so with care and professionalism.
That is why I am pleased that this budget delivers more than $14 million in additional funding to support Access Canberra to continue to deliver essential services to Canberrans as our city grows—something, again, that Mr Cain might want to get across. In his extraordinary speech he urged us to engage in more digital transactions at Access Canberra. It is well known that more than 450 transactions can be done online. The only transactions that require attendance at a shop front relate to transactions involving a photo identification or arranging new number plates, and there are not too many of those.
We have implemented further digital initiatives to assist people on-line, one of which I informed Mr Cain about mere hours ago and which he wilfully ignored We are transitioning to e-conveyancing—something Mr Cain has said that he is interested in but has not bothered to ask about. It is a theme from the opposition. They just say whatever to fit in with their political narrative, even when it has absolutely no basis in fact.
Turning to this budget’s support to the arts, members will recall that during the ACT lockdown I released my statement of ambition for the arts. It is a bold but achievable ambition for Canberra to be recognised as Australia’s arts capital, and I thank Ms Clay for recognising how genuine and committed we are to this, and Ms Lawder for welcoming the ambition. Going quickly to Ms Lawder’s comments about the detail she is looking for with the statement of ambition, I have been very clear that the next step is to develop an ACT arts policy and an ACT funding model in consultation with the community and in line with the strategies represented in the ambition. When this is completed, this will be the implementation—how we will get there with the ambition. It will provide the level of detail she is after, and we are kicking off that consultation process imminently. I trust that she will promote it and be engaged with it.
The release of the statement of ambition was supported by a suite of new budget initiatives totalling over $10 million. Several of these initiatives strengthen the operation and infrastructure of our critically important arts organisations and facilities, which do, in turn, support the entire sector. It includes further work to remediate the lead dust detected during renovations on the former transport depot in Kingston, additional operational funding for Ainslie and Belconnen arts centres, and our commitment to establish a holocaust museum and education centre in the ACT, in partnership with the federal government.
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