Page 2227 - Week 07 - Thursday, 6 June 1991
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protected because those leases and our leasehold system can so easily be given over to the advantage of 30 or 40 people in Canberra instead of the community as a whole.
There are environmental issues that are significant. We have seen the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the ACT recently recommend a light rail system and no freeways from Gungahlin. That is an important issue; but even more critical than that issue, on an environmental basis - and it overlaps, of course, with the planning issues - is the decentralisation of the town centres in the ACT, so that, no matter how people travel, whether by car or preferably by public transport, their trips are short because they can live near where they work. It is a social justice issue. It is recognised federally as a social justice issue. Every other city in Australia is trying to decentralise its employment. We have the chance to do that; yet we have seen a massive effort to try to centralise our planning. Just across the road from us we have the Taxation Office planning to employ more people in Civic and attempting to get a 40,000 square metre area in which to accommodate about 2,000 more workers. We are not ready. That will happen in due time, but at this stage those workers ought be provided in areas like Tuggeranong where we need the employment.
This Government that we have seen has not been a consultative government. I think the clearest indication of that has been the difficulty we have had over the committees. Whichever minority government had taken power today, the same situation would have applied. It is very important for us to rely on the work of those committees. We need to ensure that they are adequately funded and to provide support where necessary, perhaps by seconding people from policy sections within departments so that we do not raise any further cost. It is very important that they be supported appropriately and that members use that opportunity to make their compromises. The committees can work well. I refer to the one that I know best has worked well, and that is the Committee on HIV, Illegal Drugs and Prostitution. It has been a great credit to Mrs Nolan and Mr Wood, and I must say that I have been delighted in working with them on that.
I use that as only one example, but I recognise that every member here has been on a committee that has worked well and some people, such as Mrs Nolan, would have been on a lot more committees than other people, of course. I think that that is our real chance for getting a collegiate form of government working. It is not a collegiate form of government in the sense that Mr Jensen meant. I understand that, but we have what we have at the moment and I think that we can at least make it work. With a minority government we can make it work in order to go for some consultation.
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