Page 2448 - Week 07 - Thursday, 4 August 2022
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Delivery of basic city services should be bread and butter for the ACT government. We should have a local government that treats our city with the respect that is befitting of the nation’s capital. But what we see under Labor and the Greens is our city being neglected. What we see under Labor and the Greens is grass not mown, cracked footpaths not fixed, potholes not filled and now garbage not even being collected weekly. All the while our rates go up alarmingly each and every year. Does the Chief Minister honestly believe that basic city services are meeting demand?
The very real hardship faced by some of our most vulnerable Canberrans as a direct result of this Labor-Greens government is shameful. We are a privileged city with a local government that will do nothing about the almost 40,000 Canberrans living in poverty, including nearly 9,000 children.
The utter disregard for Canberrans living in public housing—from the debacle that is the heartless implementation of relocating vulnerable tenants through to the years and years of neglect of basic maintenance—is astonishing. Does the Chief Minister honestly think that having over 3,000 people on the public housing waiting list is meeting demand?
Ultimately, the core of all of this rot comes from a government that is long past its use-by date, completely lacking integrity and not governing in the best interest of Canberrans.
This term alone, we have seen Labor and the Greens embroiled in serious issues of probity over the Campbell Primary School modernisation project. This issue triggered an Integrity Commission inquiry into procurement across the entire ACT government because, in the Integrity Commissioner’s own words, these issues rarely happen only once and are more likely to be endemic.
We have seen the CIT contracts scandal, with almost $9 million in taxpayer funds being paid to a single contractor to provide services that are so unintelligible and jargon filled that, to this day, no-one, not even the responsible minister, has been able to explain to the Canberra public what they are for and how they represent value for money. The minister’s way of addressing the problem was to promote the deputy chair to chair of the CIT board, despite the fact that she oversaw many of these contracts. If that was not bad enough, the minister flat out refused to answer questions on notice or respond to FOI requests. The arrogance, the delusion and the lack of accountability are breathtaking.
Only a few weeks ago, the Coaldrake review delivered its scathing findings to the Queensland Labor government, saying their entire public accountability culture needed a do-over. Imagine, Madam Speaker, what a similar review in the ACT would find, after 21 years of this Labor-Greens government that is well beyond its use-by date, 21 years of this Labor-Greens government that has long stopped governing for the people of Canberra, and 21 years of this Labor-Greens government that has fostered a culture of secrecy and has completed eroded the trust of the community.
That is why I have proposed amendments to our FOI legislation to publish cabinet documents within 30 days. As a unicameral parliament, we do not have the benefit of
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