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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Wednesday, 11 February 2004) . . Page.. 178 ..

You have to look at the use of the dollars, Mr Speaker. How much is this development actually going to cost? Residents have been told that it will cost approximately $2.5 million. So where is the other half going; where is the other $2.5 million going? Again, it is sneaky. The lack of detail and the way that the community is excluded from this whole process can only be characterised as sneaky.

Then we get to the role of Mr Hargreaves and Ms MacDonald on the night the announcement came that “the government agrees with local members on Karralika”. Here is the best spin of the year. By suddenly announcing, “We agree with the local members on Karralika,” the government is saying that the local members are part of the government, that the local members are tied to this agreement.

What happened was that the local members went to a meeting, saw the anger of the community, panicked and bolted back to the minister and said, “You’ve got to do something.” So what did they do? There was a rash of press releases faxed to the media at half past 5 on a Friday night. Ms MacDonald arrived at a resident’s house and said, “It’s all okay, the development is off. We’re going to pull it and it will go through the proper process.” It was not until the press release arrived from the minister’s office, of which a copy was made available to the community, that you found in paragraph 5 the words, “But I’ll call it in.” Ms MacDonald was not telling the residents it was going to be called in. Mr Hargreaves rang another member of the community to say, “It’s okay, mate. It’s off. We fixed it. We have got the minister to come round,” but did not tell him that it was going to be called in. You have to question the fair dinkum nature of this.

Mr Speaker, we then go to the use of regulation 12. Regulation 12 is there for an important purpose. Regulation 12, used appropriately, allows for the provision of services that need to be kept confidential, and that is a service like a women’s refuge which houses somebody escaping from domestic violence. The curious thing about the minister’s justification is that it is not backed up by the residents. We are told that a number of the residents went public and said, “Hey, we think the Karralika redevelopment is a really good thing; it should go ahead.” That is not confidential. More importantly, residents actually went to the meeting at the Tuggeranong Community Council last week and signed a petition saying, “We don’t want it any bigger. We actually like it the way it is.” I think the minister’s use of regulation 12 needs to be truly examined, because I think that is the ultimate piece of sneakiness.

You then get to the timing, Mr Speaker, and there is always a trail in the timing. The plans that the architect has been issuing to residents have the date late in March on them. These plans were available for nine months before the community got to see them—nine months. We then got the minister’s press release on the budget on 6 May. You have to assume it had been through the process, you have to assume cabinet had ticked off on it, because they have got the cash, they know how much it is worth. Were the plans made available then for consultation? No, they were not. I have heard on the grapevine that some of the support groups for Karralika may even have had them mid-year. Were they made available to the general community so they could make an informed decision, Mr Speaker? No, they were not.

What we find then is that the plans were lodged on about 30 September. Normally when plans are lodged for consultation, they are put out for notification. Why did they sit in

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