Page 4362 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 8 December 1993
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up all the best players around the place. On our local railway station there was a Christian sign saying, "Jesus is coming", and underneath some wag had written, "Parramatta will get him". I have been suggesting to people for a long time, actually ever since the Assembly started, that the Assembly building be decorated with appropriate graffiti. I was even prepared to suggest some slogans. For some time I have also been recommending to ACTION that there should be an Assembly bus-shelter; that we, the 17 members of this Assembly, should have the opportunity to paint our own bus-shelter. We could have - - -
Mr Connolly: Dennis, yours was the one in Yarralumla that was abolished.
MR STEVENSON: Well said. I was thinking of putting that sort of thing on the Assembly building. The Assembly bus-shelter could show people being consulted. It could show people voting at referendums. It could show citizens speaking before the Assembly. It could show members seeing their constituents. It could show taxes being reduced. We could title it "Shangri-la". If the motion gets up, I think it is important, first of all, that we make sure that the proposals are submitted for approval and, secondly, that they certainly have non-political themes.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (11.13): Madam Speaker, the thing about being in government is that you basically have to set priorities for expenditure. The motion that has been moved by Ms Szuty will be opposed by the Government because frankly we do not see this as a sensible priority for expenditure. I was pleased that the Assembly granted Ms Szuty an extension of time and then gave her leave to further extend her time beyond the extension of time, because the very last words that she was uttering before the extension were "and this may not really involve much expenditure".
In the first extension of time she had referred to expanding the network of field workers to be out and around Canberra coordinating this art, working with this art. She said that existing youth workers could do that. Madam Speaker, I deal with workers in the community sector, and I can assure you that they do not have a lot of time to be taking on additional tasks. So the thought of our existing network of social welfare field workers having time on their hands to run around coordinating the graffiti art exercise is just not on. Within ACTION we run a program of community art - the bus-shelter program. It is a very good program. It has been running for many years. It has had significant commendations from around Australia. But it has a cost; it needs to be tightly regulated. It involves a quite significant resource commitment from ACTION officials; it involves a quite significant use of education staff; it involves vetting designs and all the rest of it.
Mr Stevenson urges that if we are going to do this we will have to vet all designs - not only vet them, but censor them. According to Mr Stevenson, we cannot have a political design. What is a political design? Mr Stevenson said that he particularly liked the bus-shelter with the dolphin on it. It was indeed a very nice bus-shelter. Mr Stevenson, the dolphin has basically been adopted as a symbol of the environmental movement, indeed to the point where commercial advertisers now whack dolphins on their products to indicate that they are environmentally safe. Mr Stevenson, the dolphin painting was basically an
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