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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (10 December) . . Page.. 4635 ..

MS HORODNY (continuing):

This is doomed to failure, I am afraid. There is nothing in it to salvage. The whole problem with going through the process that you have gone through is that you have not considered that to put through a strategic plan you need to bring everyone with you. To make sure that the formula is right, you need to make sure that the process is right. If you have it wrong at that basic level, you are not going to get anywhere.

MS McRAE (4.36): Mr Speaker, I wish to move the amendment circulated in my name and to explain. The amendment reads:

"I move that before the report is noted, and further the government re-do the ACT Strategic Plan and bring it back to the Assembly with:

(a) a clear commitment to the agreed outcomes of the 1993 Assembly's 2020 report;

(b) the commitment of the Commonwealth to the strategic plan for the ACT.".

What I would like to do is rename this plan as well. As Mr Moore said, it has nothing to do with an ACT strategic plan. It is an economic plan. It is a simplistic answer to one problem. That is why it is not a strategic plan. It offers very little to the people of the ACT. An economic plan is one that is focused on jobs. I would like to remind members of times well within all our lifetimes, perhaps 25 years ago, when there was full employment and when the economy was thriving. What sorts of times did we have then? We paid no heed to ecological sustainability and no heed to the waste we were building up and destroying our cities with. Discrimination was rife. Migrants were never taught English in the workplace. There was no EEO. There were barriers to women's employment. We had a society which did not offer to all its citizens the full range of choices that people want now. People with disabilities were in asylums, and aged persons could not get appropriate care. But everybody who wanted a job had a job. So, simply to talk about jobs has nothing to do with strategic planning.

People's needs are complex and varied. When we are talking about the ACT community strategic plan we are talking about the full range of those complex needs which require attention and cannot be ignored. This document is a simplistic answer to one issue which does not deal in any way strategically with the full range of issues that any community wants dealt with. That is why I am pulling people back to the 2020 report where, in fact, the community, working very closely with the business sector, with the Government and with the Assembly, went through the full range of those complex issues that make up the quality of life in our community and in every community in Australia and the world.

People care about child care. People care about workplace practices. People care about transport practices. People care about the quality of the suburban life. People care about care for others. They do not simply and simplistically care about one issue and one issue only. They may put one up as their priority issue, and I respect that; but that does not give the Government the right to cop out on it and to simply end up with an economic plan which does not deal with the real issues of a community which should have been dealt with in a strategic plan. This is a management plan. This is a picture of what government is either doing or able to do or wants to do. It involves no-one from the

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