Page 1017 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 26 July 1989
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Worst of all, the Age ran a photograph of the Melbourne Building taken in 1932 and underneath ran a caption, "Civic, Canberra's main shopping district, pictured 57 years ago. Or was it 57 minutes ago?".
This kind of nonsense, Mr Speaker, is typical of the Canberra-bashing which has gone on in the interstate press for decades. It is the kind of Canberra-bashing in which interstate journalists like to indulge when there is nothing better to report to their masters in Sydney and Melbourne. There was a lot of this sort of reporting during the recent ACT election campaign, when experienced journalists attempted to belittle self-government and mock the parties and candidates involved.
It is a great pity that these journalists remain so ignorant about the city in which they work. It is also a pity that they spend so much of their sheltered lives gossiping in one of the most cloistered and closed places in Canberra, the federal press gallery. Haupt's and Whelan's lives appear to be so sheltered that they still believe that Kambah, Kaleen and Wanniassa are the newer suburbs in Canberra.
This article, unfortunately, has reinforced a lot of myths and misconceptions about Canberra. The popular image of Canberra is a cold and isolated place, a place vastly inferior to Surfers Paradise, or Adelaide in Grand Prix week, a place to be avoided at all costs. It is an image I hope everybody in this place rejects.
The article does nothing to dispel this image or encourage people to come to Canberra. I hope the two journalists concerned will attempt to dig a little deeper next time to write about Canberra and to try to find out a bit more about this vibrant and progressive city which lies outside the Parliamentary Triangle.
As I said in my opening remarks, the article did, beneath the hyperbole, contain a message that this Assembly in general and the Labor Government in particular need to know. It portrays the city as one wrapped in its own bureaucracy and paints a Pythonesque picture of bureaucracy gone mad.
They point to a number of statutory bodies, and I will refer to something they say:
There are no blanker bureaucratic walls than those of Canberra's own bureaucracies.
They are referring here to the ACT's bureaucracies rather than the Federal ones. They continue:
Behind them, in serried ranks, shelter an extraordinary range of "advisory committees", an immense army of administration whose consumption of paper-clips alone would swallow the budgets of mere town councils.
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