Page 2900 - Week 09 - Thursday, 18 August 2005
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and to respond to you in relation to all parts of the question. Yes, I am more than happy today to provide to the Assembly those documents that are available and readily able to be provided. I do not know what they are. It might be that there are some documents that it would not be convenient or appropriate to table today. I simply do not know. I will take advice on that. But I am more than happy to provide everything that is available to you and to the Assembly.
DR FOSKEY: I ask a supplementary question. Mr Stanhope, I wonder if you could explain why it is that there is not anyone on the advisory committee with environmental expertise?
MR STANHOPE: It is a question that I think any organisation, and particularly any government, faces with any committee. A decision was taken about the membership of the dragway committee that was inclusive of motor sport within the ACT. It was inclusive to the extent that it included the chairs of the North Canberra Community Council and the Hackett Community Association and has as a specialist member a noise expert from the University of New South Wales at ADFA. It is chaired by Geoff Cannock, the Chief Executive Officer of the Royal Canberra Agricultural Society. I think it is a particularly good committee. It is a committee, of course, focused on motor sport, but with the chairs of both the North Canberra Community Council and the Hackett Community Association as full members, there was a genuine commitment by the government to ensure that the broad interests of residents were involved.
In relation to the studies that are being undertaken, they are being undertaken through full access to specialists. There is no inhibition on any resident Canberran making submissions involving themselves, just as the residents of north Canberra are doing, and doing very energetically. In relation to the environmental studies into noise and other environmental impacts, the government welcomes responses from all people within the community, including, of course, anybody with a particular focus on the environment.
Public service
MR MULCAHY: My question is to the Minister for Industrial Relations. The minister will recall admitting to a gaffe that in granting pay increases amounting to some $50 million to the ACT public sector she did not seek any productivity improvements or any gains in terms of more or better services to the community. She compounded the gaffe by asserting that productivity gains in return for pay increases meant a reduction in employment conditions. By contrast, however, in addition to what her government’s economic white paper says about the importance of productivity growth for raising living standards, the Chief Minister has now come on board, saying that productivity growth is a legitimate goal of business, including government, which is a business in its own right.
MR SPEAKER: Is this a speech or a question, Mr Mulcahy?
MR MULCAHY: I am just giving the minister information, Mr Speaker.
MR SPEAKER: Come to the question.
MR MULCAHY: My question to the minister is: do you repudiate this embarrassing contradiction by the Chief Minister in his statement of 30 July 2005?
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