Page 304 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 1 March 1994
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What we have done, Madam Speaker, is reduce the height of the building from six to four storeys and drop it into the hill, so that it presents to Vernon Circle as a three-storey building, which was the concern of the national capital planners. The national capital planners have agreed that we can go ahead with that as a landmark building and they will then proceed with the longer-term planning for that whole precinct. They accept as a given that the court precinct will be a significant part of the landscape, as it should be, because in any civic community a courthouse is a prominent landmark in the local environment.
This will allow us to have facilities so that women seeking domestic violence orders are not confronted with the perpetrator in the corridors of the court. Anybody who has been to the ACT courts would know the run-down state of the infrastructure that this Territory as a body politic inherited. The courts were run down, the police stations were run down, the juvenile justice infrastructure was run down, and there is no prison infrastructure. Since this Government has been in office we now have the courthouse project up and running. I was pleased to see a press statement put out today by the Master Builders Association congratulating the Government on taking this project to fruition. It will mean $17.2m being injected into the local building industry, and local builders getting out there employing people to do the work. On Friday we opened the new Quamby juvenile justice centre, which is a quantum leap in facilities for incarcerating young offenders in the ACT and pointing them in the direction of rehabilitation rather than reoffending; a facility of a quality and standard of care that exceeds anything else currently in Australia. The architects tell me that it probably exceeds anything available in North America as well.
Anybody who has driven out to Belconnen shopping centre recently would note a lot of activity going on at the old TAFE there, which is being refurbished at a cost of some $10m to provide a new regional police headquarters for the ACT. Our record on delivering law and order infrastructure in this Territory is outstanding. It is way in excess of anything that happened when the Liberals were in office. Come to think of it, nothing happened when the Liberals were in office. Madam Speaker, again, we have solved the problem with the city courthouse, like this Government solves all the problems it is confronted with; unlike this discredited Opposition which can offer nothing constructive other than ferreting around in the smelliest rubbish bin it can see.
ACTTAB - Contract with VITAB Ltd
MR CORNWELL: Madam Speaker, my question is to the Deputy Chief Minister in his capacity as Minister for Sport. Mr Berry, on a number of occasions you have advised the Assembly that providing an avenue for Asian punters would greatly benefit the ACT in a financial sense.
Mr Berry: I told you; I answered that question.
MR CORNWELL: You have not answered this one. I am not even sure that you answered the first one. Why did you not open either an ACTTAB branch or an agency in Vanuatu, as the Victorian TAB has done, instead of signing a deal with VITAB?
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