Page 1575 - Week 05 - Thursday, 11 May 2006
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Members of the opposition talk about the arboretum. This is a classic from these guys. Let’s talk about their funding priorities. I am fixing up roads that these guys should have fixed up years ago, but what were they doing with their money, Mr Speaker? I will tell you what they were doing with their money. They were fixing up Bruce Stadium. They were painting grass green. We did some painting too, but it was not of grass; it was of a bit of highway to protect cyclists. No, they painted a whole bloody oval green. And then, of course, we had the Kinlyside debacle, we had the overnight loans debacle and the Manuka Oval debacle.
How about the advertising on jets? Mr Speaker, do you remember the Feel the Power campaign? We certainly felt the power, didn’t we? I certainly felt the power when I went to Melbourne to visit friends and they said, “You come from Canberra, don’t you? That was a good one.” What about the Impulse Airlines investment, Mr Speaker? That was a good one. And then, of course, we had some classic land swaps. If all of the money that was applied to that had been applied to infrastructure such as roads or to essential services, we would not have been in half the pickle that we were when we took government in 2001.
Mr Speaker, a lot of what Mr Pratt was going on about is essentially out of date. Obviously, he only listens to himself on the news and watches himself on the telly and does not pay attention to anything else. He says that I have not done anything about the AusLink program. He ought to know that the ACT government has been in a running gun battle with the federal government over AusLink for more years than I can remember. The AusLink program is all about the major highway network right around the country, and we argue that the ACT, through the Barton Highway, the Monaro Highway, Canberra Avenue to a degree and certainly the Majura parkway, which we would love to see up and running, is and should be part of that network. But what has happened is that the federal government has just excised this territory and said, “No, we are going to go from Yass through to Goulburn and you do not exist; you are not in the network.”
Every year we open it up for discussion and every year their hearing aid fails and we get nowhere, but we continue to fight. I do not see Mr Pratt getting on the phone to his mate little Jimmy Lloyd and saying, “Give us some money, please, mate. Put us into the system.” We do not want more money than we are due; we just want to be in the system. No way; he does not do that. What he does is he comes in here and complains.
I come to the Pialligo Avenue issue, one which the guys opposite blow completely out of proportion. I went there and sat in peak hour traffic. Firstly, I have to say that peak hour is only 20 minutes long. It is like Mr Pratt, who takes 90 minutes to watch 60 minutes. The problem with that particular piece of highway is attributable to what? Is it attributable to the airport getting more passengers? Yes, that is a fair call. How about the residential development boom in Queanbeyan? Do we have more people coming into town through Canberra Avenue, the Monaro Highway and Fairburn Avenue? Yes, but that is not of the ACT’s doing. How about the potential for the defence theatre? Yes, that is going to contribute. Mr Speaker, there is a whole heap of reasons.
What I have done about that—I have had preliminary discussions and there are more to come—is that I have figured out that the problem is wider than one for the ACT
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