Page 4650 - Week 14 - Thursday, 24 November 2005
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here to praise today, not just some sort of Trojan Horse motion from Ms Porter. One of the things that intrigue me, and I would love to see whether there was a study—
Mr Hargreaves: I raise a point of order, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker: it is not a motion; it is an MPI.
MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER: You are correct, Mr Hargreaves.
MR SMYTH: Well picked. Mr Hargreaves has woken up. He has woken up to the MPI. There we go, there we go, there we go—the same again, cheap political point scoring! Let us get in the swing of it, John. You got the jump; you got the 15-minute speech, which you could not fill. But that is all we expect from those opposite, and that is all we have seen from them, certainly in the last couple of weeks.
One of the things that allow volunteering to be so successful in the ACT, and it is something we have got to try to balance, is that many Canberrans use their private motor vehicles as their primary mode of transport You can ask the question: is there a dividend from that? The answer is yes, there is a dividend from that. There is a dividend because people are willing to use their vehicles, for instance, to join the driver service at Belconnen community centre, where they volunteer to transport those Canberrans who do not have transport, or who are unable to drive, to medical appointments, to the community centre for senior citizens functions, for all sorts of activities. They do that with their own private vehicles.
It has been brought to my attention that the recent refurbishment of Bunda Street has caused some problems in that there used to be six or eight disabled-driver parking spots in very close proximity to the old Griffin Centre, and I am told that they are not there now. The Minister for Urban Services might like to tell us what he is going to do about this. It is causing no end of havoc to those that use their private vehicles to go to the Griffin Centre, to assist—
Mr Hargreaves: There will be more.
MR SMYTH: The minister interjects from across the chamber that there will be more. But the problem is, minister, that they are not there now, and it is causing a large number of groups no end of discomfort because their volunteers cannot get close. They cannot park, they cannot drop elderly, infirm or disabled Canberrans off safely. They are getting parking tickets and being booked for parking illegally, which we all know we should not do, but with the right intention of either collecting—
Mr Hargreaves: You know that’s not so.
MR SMYTH: The minister interjects that it is not so. Why are people saying that they are being booked? The problem is—
Mr Hargreaves: We’ve got plenty of capacity.
MR SMYTH: The problem is that the parking has disappeared and agreements that were reached to provide parking have not been kept. The two ministers here, the Minister for
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