Page 1580 - Week 06 - Thursday, 3 May 1990
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constituents are writing to us". I have had a couple of letters about housing issues from the Leader of the Opposition. I have passed them on quickly to the Housing Trust and asked for these matters to be looked at. They are important issues, and I attend to them.
You thought you would make a good win on the Ainslie tip and lock us totally out of being able to do anything about it politically, did you not? You did that, and indeed I was faced with taking my officers up to the Northbourne Flats - - -
Mr Berry: I wish you were in charge of the Ainslie tip because you would have backed off on that, too; that would have been all right.
MR COLLAERY: If I were in charge of the Ainslie tip I would be recycling a few animate objects, I can assure you. Do not tempt me to choose them right now.
Mr Deputy Speaker, we saw here today their sort of shallow commitment to the real interests of the disadvantaged in society. Why did Mrs Grassby not take the opportunity to give a good commitment by Labor to the Burdekin report on housing? Why did this member not decide to commit her Labor Party for the long period, the millennia, that it will be in opposition to assisting us in a joint effort to attend to the serious concerns of public housing in the ACT? No, you did not want to take the opportunity.
What have we heard from you about the Gowrie Hostel closure? What word did you say to help us? If you had come in and had a go at your Federal colleagues, the ACT ratepayer would not now be faced with the legal costs of these proceedings. You know what legal proceedings cost. They might cost as much as your Ainslie tip.
Members interjected.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Come on, we have got about five people talking at once.
MR COLLAERY: We had to sit quietly while you did some
points during the week. It hurts, does it not, when we reverse it? We will be very, very careful in future. You will not get a chance. We will proceed with our housing policy initiatives resolutely. We will make the hard decisions and we will look after housing matters such as the funds I have recently given to the Havelock House committee - $135,000 to do up the hall of residence and to improve that novel and unique structure quite close to the city. I tell you, Mr Deputy Speaker, they are thanking us, not that Opposition on the other side of the house. Those groups know, and increasingly know, to whom to come to ask for assistance. They are doing that. You are making a little bit of running on the Griffin Centre because you know, and you knew when you were in government, that you cannot give 10-year leases in a city zone. No government in this country can give a 10-year lease.
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