Page 2264 - Week 07 - Thursday, 23 June 2005
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I think it is probably in breach of the design guidelines, which say that you have to have beige buildings. But if we have wall art on every street in Canberra there will be no graffiti because there will be no room for it. So we now have a wall art-led recovery to the graffiti.
Mr Hargreaves: Good one.
MRS DUNNE: It is a good one. It is no worse than your analogy about a policeman at the bottom of every driveway, Mr Hargreaves. It is interesting that Mr Hargreaves has picked up on what Brisbane has been doing. He has gone round the country and discovered what Brisbane has been doing. It is interesting that Mr Pratt’s predecessor in the urban services portfolio for the Liberal Party, Mr Cornwell, spent ages talking about what Brisbane was doing, encouraging the government to take up some of the proposals in Brisbane. At least somebody listened to him a bit when they said, “Perhaps, minister, we should go and see what Mr Cornwell has been talking about concerning Brisbane.” The bluff and bluster goes on.
I really like the wall art approach, and there we have it. We have to go after Mr Pratt on something else. When we are talking about these issues, Mr Hargreaves has a little go about rainwater tanks. It is absolutely impossible, he says, for schools to install rainwater tanks because that would have an effect on the flows of water into the rivers, into the groundwater, et cetera, et cetera, and would have an impact on the Murray-Darling Basin.
The installation of rainwater tanks is a prime part of the policy of the Stanhope Labor government. They want to have rainwater tanks everywhere. They want to subsidise them. He said, “We would have a little dam at every school and that would be a terrible thing.” I have some sympathy with that argument, that point of view. Mr Hargreaves probably knows well my views on the efficacy of water tanks. I am glad that there is some sense in the government that, in pooh-poohing the idea, he is in fact pooh-poohing the policy of his own government. So he needs to get it right.
We were talking the other day about unity and contradictions amongst the government. Mr Stanhope and Mr Hargreaves had better sit down and have a discussion about the efficacy of water tanks. I encourage you, Mr Hargreaves, to speak to your leader about the efficacy of water tanks. I think it would be for the benefit of the whole community. But, while it is government policy to subsidise water tanks, perhaps it is something that you should consider in relation to keeping gardens and particularly sportsgrounds around schools safe for our children.
One of the issues that I want to touch on is the safety of our children at schools. My colleague Mr Stefaniak has spoken at length about the running down of the asset that is our sportsgrounds within this environment, the impact that has on the fitness of children and the long-term impact on the safety of children who use those sportsgrounds. Even if they are not allowed to play sport there, they run around on them on the weekend and they play on them after school. They are hallowed. The grass is tussocky and brittle. There are places where people have fallen over and hurt their ankles and have sustained worse injuries than they would have before simply because the government does not have a rational approach to watering during the drought.
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