Page 1448 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 1 June 2022
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government’s refusal to accept responsibility for maintaining its own asset. That left the Canberra Capitals without a permanent home and the city without a venue for major indoor entertainment activities.
During the early stages of the pandemic, the territory government spent close to $400,000 to enable the site to be fit for use as a COVID-19 mass vaccination hub. That hub closed yesterday, after providing nearly 300,000 vaccinations. It is now time for the federal government to invest in restoring that facility, so we welcome the federal Labor government’s commitment to invest $15 million to appropriately upgrade the arena and to go beyond ensuring that it is just safe but to provide a higher quality audience and player experience.
One suggestion I put forward is that I do not believe the arena has ever been climate controlled, so it gets very cold in winter and very hot in summer. My suggestion to my federal colleagues, as part of that $15 million upgrade, is to also look at climate control in the venue.
This important investment will not only significantly extend the life span of the arena, but also enables us to have a broader conversation about the future of the AIS precinct, its potential renewal, and the opportunity to better utilise the land in that precinct to support improved sporting infrastructure and improved community amenity. I look forward to further engaging with the federal government on this matter, and note its willingness to invest in its own assets, as opposed to the last 10 years when the federal government shirked that responsibility.
There are, of course, many issues that require constructive cross-government collaboration, including some of the big issues that we know Canberrans care about. The last few years have been challenging for everyone, as we have responded to the pandemic and focused on our economic recovery.
As requested by Prime Minister Albanese, the first meeting between the Prime Minister, premiers and chief ministers will take place in a few weeks time. There is clearly a lot to discuss and coordinate, including the ongoing management of the pandemic as we head into the winter months. Of course, national health reform, schools reform and a new national skills agreement will be significant agenda items in the months and years ahead.
The response to climate change will also dominate public policy in the next few years. May’s federal election result, thankfully, should signal the end of the “climate wars”. It is fair to say that, for the past decade, the states and territories have been left to do the heavy lifting on real climate action. For a decade the federal coalition government coasted on the coat-tails of the states and territories, and throughout they were brandishing lumps of coal in parliament—sometimes even auctioning them off, I understand, at Liberal Party fundraisers. That era is over, and many Canberrans and an overwhelming majority of Australians are pleased that that is the case.
Locally, as you are all aware, we have led the nation as the first jurisdiction to reach 100 per cent renewable electricity in 2020, and we continue diligently to work towards our target of net zero emissions by 2045 at the latest. This jurisdiction, one of
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