Page 3780 - Week 14 - Thursday, 10 December 1992
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I would also like to commend the people who appeared before the public hearing for the time taken by them and the effort put into their submissions. I can guarantee on my behalf to those people, both individually and as groups, that every part of their submissions was taken very seriously. A great deal of credence was put upon all of the words they had to say to the committee. The number of submissions received from the community by this committee has to be acknowledged as a testimony to the value of cultural and heritage activities and the participation rate that we have in Canberra. I cannot imagine any other place in Australia having such an enormous input from the community into an inquiry of this kind, particularly given the timeframe in which we had to work. The importance that our Canberra community puts on cultural and heritage activities is worth noting. As I have said, this is reflected by the submissions received and the public hearings effort.
I would like to reiterate the praise and the thanks to the staff already mentioned by the previous speakers. We all know, as members of this Assembly and as participants in many committees, the amount of work that we have to do to try to keep up with the proceedings of all of our committees. That would be absolutely impossible without the dedication of the committee secretariat staff. In relation to this report, the turnaround time was very fast. I would like personally to thank those staff as well. We could not have deliberated as we did without their input.
In the last part of this report the approximate dollar value of requests, costed and uncosted, is given, and that, in some way, I think, puts into perspective the effort and the deliberations that we, as members of this committee, had to put ourselves through. It was not an easy process. I completely agree with the comments of Mr Kaine in relation to those many minor applications in terms of money when we are considering splitting up $19m. I am very sorry that we could not have said, "Here is the $5,000 you want" or "Here is the $25,000 you want". In relation to $19m, those sums appear fairly minor, but for each of those groups the money would have been manna from heaven. I am sorry that we could not do that, but I also agree with the theory of why we could not do it.
I look forward to the instigation of that trust system. I think that is a great idea in order to get around a problem. I think that the community in Canberra, given their interest in this sort of activity, will have no problem in going through the system that will be set up to adequately and appropriately hand out some of that money at different times to some of those groups. I wish those groups all the best in those endeavours. I also wish to commend this report to the Assembly. Given the time that we had to work in, I think we have come up with a very good and very fair report, and very balanced recommendations. I join the other speakers in commending the report to the Assembly.
MR DE DOMENICO (11.00): Madam Speaker, I will be brief in my comments. I endorse the comments made by the chairman, Mr Kaine and Ms Ellis about the magnificent work done by Rod Power, Katrina Wilson and Karen Pearce. As someone who is newly elected to this place, I do sometimes get the idea that some people outside this place tend to think that we are all moribund, that we never do any work and that we all have Olympic size swimming pools in our backyards. This committee had the daunting task of trying to allocate $19m out of an ask of, I think, over $300m. When it all boils down, there were over $300m worth of requests, some of them albeit doubling up and what have you. It was a daunting task.
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