Page 1004 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 19 March 1991
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place. I can inform the house that the proprietor, on my last advice last week, was willing to grant a further lease on that commercial shopfront area. I want to say and to put on the record that that is blue chip frontage. I do not believe that we can afford the escalating rent rises for the next 10 years on that blue chip frontage, and we need to look for the long term in Weston Creek. I will come back to that.
Ms Follett also said that they did not know whether additional funds would be granted. They were told by me, and they have been told by my department on numerous occasions, that we will meet the costs of the extra rent. I suggest to you that, were there representatives of the Weston Creek Community Service here now, they would nod and put down the nonsense that this person who purports to offer an alternative government put to us today. It was entirely improper of the Leader of the Opposition to make all those propositions which are fundamentally wrong and clearly untrue.
Ms Follett also said that the Weston Creek Community Service had not been properly consulted. Well, Ms Follett has a press release, I am sure, from the director of the community service - the last one that was issued by fax on 13 March - and that document refers to contact with the Alliance Government, and other press releases refer to contact with me, as Minister. They have been consulted. There have been literally scores of phone calls to my office and to my ministerial staff. There has been a high volume of personalised interface action between my ministerial office and that service. Not been properly consulted? I think we have gone the other way. We have discussed it at great length. Ms Follett said that the Alliance does not know what is going on out there. She failed to respond - I put it on the record - to a challenge as to whether she has been to those places, not just to a hall where the usual Abolish Self Government or Labor beat-up had to be done. I am talking about the actual places. Has she been there and spoken to the supervisors in those places, as I have as Minister on more than one occasion?
Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, this again is an MPI that lacks a credible base. This Government has to defend itself from the most simplistic and superficially attractive propositions. They may attract some tabloid press, and they may well get, through scaremongering, people to public meetings; but they do nothing for the level of government in this Territory.
This Government, following the tradition of this city, will, when resources permit, look carefully at the prospect of consolidating those functions, as we have, and as previous Federal governments have, in Belconnen, at Majura, and now, under our Government, beside the Griffin Centre. Recently Mr Jensen and I laid the foundation stone for the Tuggeranong Community Centre, and, of course, we have other centres in the Territory.
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