Page 1831 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 19 August 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
a wonderful city in which to live; it is a wonderful city in which to bring up our families. We know that. We do not have to worry too much about what other people think and say, and we certainly do not have to go over the top about it.
Mr Kaine brought up the motion and we have all had a nice chat about it. I think that we will all support it. I am sure it will be more useful if Mr Kaine is one of the people who lead the way with the Canberra Times/Age letters to the editor arrangement by which people can explain the way that they are thinking about this issue. The worst thing you can do in the schoolyard, and the worst thing we can do here, is to get too precious about Canberra bashing, because the more we are seen to react to it, the more it will go on.
MRS GRASSBY (12.07): Every country I have been in seems to be very proud of their capital. I think that what we are suffering from is the tall poppy syndrome. Canberra is a beautiful city. Anybody who has ever come to Canberra will say so. I have heard the politicians who make these statements outside Canberra say, when walking around Canberra, how much they enjoy being in Canberra. I think it is just the tall poppy syndrome: "Pull it down because I cannot have it and I do not live there". We would be very happy for them all to come and live here and to pay us taxes, particularly if we can get land tax from them. We would be very happy for that to happen.
Ms Follett: We have a few of them.
MRS GRASSBY: Yes, we have. I agree with the statement about being jealous. I think that is true, and I think that we are being a bit precious. Sometimes we are better off to ignore some of these things. The trouble with a lot of these Federal members is that they do not do a very good job in their own electorate. They do not have anything else to pull down, so they spend their time trying to pull down Canberra.
We are very lucky, because this city was created to be a capital. It was designed to be a capital, so it must be better than any other city in Australia. If you set out to design something and you design it as well as this has been designed, it will be better than everywhere else. I think we have attracted some wonderful people to Canberra. This has been going on over many years. They came here for good reasons. It is a beautiful city; it is a lovely city to bring your children up in; it is a lovely city for people in their retirement, as they can walk around and enjoy the lakes and things like that. This city was created to be beautiful. The trouble with most of our politicians up on the hill is that they do not have anything else to talk about. They spend their time running around Australia blaming all the things that they cannot do, because obviously they are inefficient, on Canberra. They have to pull Canberra down. They sit in their little ivory tower up there on the hill - we call it the pimple on the hill - and that is all they worry about.
I am very proud of Canberra, and I am proud to represent Canberra in this Assembly and outside. I speak to people all around Australia that I meet from time to time when travelling. If they have been to Canberra they say, "Gosh, it is a wonderful city". Of course, jokingly, they use the statement they hear from all the politicians outside. They say, "Of course, we know where all our tax money goes to". We know that that is not true, because we know that we lost $10m. We got a lot less than the Northern Territory and we had to manage on that. We did well and we have been able to keep Canberra looking as beautiful as it is.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .