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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 4 Hansard (8 May) . . Page.. 1165 ..

MR OSBORNE (continuing):

we need a stand-alone economy of the type that can ride out the whims of our Federal colleagues. Is this possible in the near future? I hope so. A plan to get us to that point, even a "courageous plan", will have my support. I fear for the future of Canberra otherwise.

My final point, and the one that is most distressing to me, is that there is not a lot in this budget for my electorate. Down south, we have half of the children under the age of 15 who live in Canberra; but the reality is that there are not enough child-care facilities, library books, schoolteachers, school resources, health care facilities, bus shelters, cyclepaths, sportsfields and local jobs. Why should I support spending money in areas of the city where few people are living, instead of raising the level of local services in my electorate up to the same levels that the more established areas of the city already have?

Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, as well as being left with lower service levels, as far as I can tell, we get no capital works. I wonder how many times this year Mrs Carnell has driven along Drakeford Drive and been caught in the bottleneck after Athllon Drive, especially around peak hour. It is disgraceful. I wonder how many times Mrs Carnell has walked around Lake Tuggeranong and been forced to go onto the road for a stretch near Greenway. Why on earth this bike pathway has not been linked, I will never know. The one fear I have is that some young child is going to be cleaned up because of the many blind spots on that part of the road. I plead with the relevant Minister, Mr Kaine, a member for Brindabella, to fix up this small section of the pathway. Surely it is not going to have that much of an impact on the budget. They are two things in Tuggeranong that stand out to me as needing to be addressed quickly.

Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I have to say, as I referred to during question time, that I am also very disappointed about the fact that the Community Arts Centre has been only half finished. Not long after coming to government, Mr Humphries discovered that the former Labor Government had failed to include the cost of furniture in the newly reconstructed police station in Civic. I am sure that Mr Humphries remembers only too well how he dined out for the next six months on ridiculing this Opposition on that one. What Mr Humphries has done at the Tuggeranong Community Arts Centre makes the mere omission of furniture, by comparison, pale into insignificance. Not only do we have no furniture; we also have no proper flooring, no stage, no sound equipment, no lighting and no heating. I realise that, at the time, Mr Humphries was proud of the Arts Centre's new, innovative design when he unveiled its plans earlier this year, but I think he got a bit carried away somehow. I know that the Tuggeranong arts community has had to do without a facility for a very long time; but they seem not to be a whole lot better off than they were previously, with only four walls, a roof and a concrete floor.

My message to Mrs Carnell and Mr Humphries is simple: Before you go fixing up the sportsgrounds, roads and arts facilities in your own electorate, as you have planned in this budget, you must first finish what you started in mine. This project has been left short by $130,000, and it is for all the essential items that go into making up an arts centre. What they will be left with is a cold, dark shell that is totally unsuitable for its arts purposes and therefore unviable. Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I think the Government needs to commit to finishing this job properly, and then I will consider whether I think the capital works projects down in my part of the city are satisfactory.

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