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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (10 December) . . Page.. 4603 ..

MRS CARNELL: All I can say is, "Thank you, Dorothy". I could not have asked for a question I would rather have had today. Mr Moore, I am absolutely fascinated by the comments you and others have made about a document that is not insignificant and has taken a number of months to put together. Those opposite and others in this Assembly were quite willing to make comments on it, and quite fulsome comments, when they simply could not have read the document in the timeframe they had. We launched the strategic plan yesterday. There is probably some indication that maybe we should not be talking about it in question time when I am going to table it straight after question time, but I think that is something we can put aside. I am very happy to talk about it.

This is a strategic plan for which this Government started the consultation period quite a number of months ago - I think it must be over 12 months now. We took the approach that what we needed for a strategic approach in the ACT to determine which way this city was heading was initially to ask the people, to ask Canberrans - not to ask the Business Council necessarily, the people who sit around the table here. We went down the path of asking the people of Canberra what they wanted for their city, where they believed Canberra should be heading. We had 12 community forums, including two advertised public meetings in July. My understanding is that over 200 people turned up at those public meetings. We had focus groups so that we could make sure that we took the information we got from some of the questionnaires and fleshed it out, as you do in focus groups. We had workshops.

We interviewed fully quite a number of prominent Canberrans to ask them what they thought. We put out a questionnaire in the Chronicles. I think about 100,000 of those go out in the ACT, and we were very pleased to have 1,200 responses to that questionnaire. That is a very significant response rate, which shows that a lot of Canberrans really care about the direction in which their city is going. The thing that was very interesting about those responses was that all those groups said that the thing that mattered in this city at the moment was jobs and how we were going to get a strategic direction based upon having a sound economic base for Canberra in the future. Mr Moore made the comment that the Business Council is the only entity that might have been asked about this. He forgot about the advertised public meetings, the Canberra public - all those sorts of things.

One thing that is interesting is that only one of the planks of the strategic plan is about economic development. The other strategies concentrate on such things as ecological sustainability, social equity and the regional partnership. It is very hard for me to believe that somehow those things are ingrained in Business Council philosophy or, for that matter, Liberal Party philosophy totally. I would have thought everybody in this place supported ecological sustainability, social equality and, of course, the regional partnership issues.

I have often heard Ms Follett and others on the other side of the house, and Mr Moore as well, say that they believe that the future of jobs in this city is in the private sector. Probably the only people who have not suggested that jobs growth in this city - - -

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