Page 1813 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 19 August 1992
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My motion is based specifically on an article that appeared in the Melbourne Age on Thursday, 25 June. The heading was, "Rally rebukes Canberra for centre closure". The article had to do with the failure by the Commonwealth to fund a community centre in Coburg in Victoria. Apart from the fact that the heading blames Canberra for this, and I do not believe that we warrant that at all, I believe that we here in Canberra have every sympathy with the citizens of Coburg who could not get Federal funding, because in many cases we cannot get it either.
We in Canberra are no different from the people of Coburg in that respect. We cannot just go to the Commonwealth any more. In the good old halcyon days money was handed out like it was going out of style, but with self-government that has stopped. If we want a welfare centre in Canberra we cannot go to the Commonwealth and say, "Give us the money". They would do the same as they did to the people of Coburg, and say, "Go away; we cannot afford it". So we have a great deal of sympathy for them.
I think that the people in the media reporting these events, and Federal politicians who have something to gain by bashing us in Canberra, ought to get themselves up to speed with what the conditions are in Canberra today. The article, when you start reading it, in essence does not support the heading. They really are criticising the Federal Government. Mr Cleary, the bloke who beat the daylights out of the Labor Party in getting himself elected in Coburg, is quoted as follows:
"It is really distressing that the Labor Party can't understand what conditions are like in the northern suburbs." The jobless rate there did not worry Labor enough, he said.
He was talking about Mr Keating and the people over the road. That is quite clear. Councillor Ingham said:
I might be paranoid, but I can't see any other reason. This is the politics of revenge and punishment.
It is quite clear who he was talking about. He was saying that the Labor Federal Government did not get their man elected, so they are beating the daylights out of Coburg now because it is no longer a Labor seat. But then they spoiled it, Madam Speaker. The Labor MLA for Richmond, a local MLA, was quoted. It is not only Labor MLAs who do this. I have to concede that Federal members and State members of all political persuasions do this, but this happened to be Mr Demetri Dollis. He got right off the rails. This newspaper report says:
Mr Dollis said he was trying to get all state and federal MPs from the region together next week to fight for funds.
That is fine. The report went on:
Canberra was an isolated island in Australia. "It is a city with almost no unemployment, no recession, and security of employment is always there."
I suggest that Mr Demetri Dollis ought to pay a visit to Canberra and test his proposition on all of those three counts. Of course we have unemployment - 8.4 per cent of it at last count - and we have a very high youth unemployment rate. Even the Commonwealth is concerned; they are going to put a building up so that they can create 2,000 jobs. Yet Mr Dollis says that we have no unemployment problem in the ACT and that we have no recession.
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