Page 3838 - Week 12 - Thursday, 23 November 2006
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People from all of these places have to go past a minimum of two public libraries to get to Griffith library.
Mrs Burke: What does that tell you then?
MR HARGREAVES: What that tells me is that we should be enhancing our library service in our group centres, and that is what we are doing. Mr Speaker, I think I mentioned this yesterday but I am quite happy to do it again today. When I went to Melbourne recently I visited a couple of city councils. They have a catchment area of 100,000 people. The ACT would be the equivalent of three of these city councils in terms of size. Those council areas have one public library in each of them. That is one public library to 100,000 people. We have—
Mr Pratt: So are we going to dumb down our standards?
MR HARGREAVES: Mr Pratt would dumb the place down. We have one library for 50,000 people, excluding Griffith library, and I propose to make that the norm.
Mr Speaker, as you might imagine, the government will not be supporting this motion. We are not going to give Mr Pratt any more oxygen than he needs.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (11.28): I support Mr Pratt’s motion to refer the Griffith library matter to the Standing Committee on Planning and Environment. Of course, it could just as easily have been referred to the Standing Committee on Education, Training and Young People, because libraries are an essential part of our out-of-school learning facilities. For this reason alone, I oppose the closing of the Griffith library.
I would have to say up front that you just cannot have too many libraries in a city. That is probably something that we would all understand. It is not a question of there being too many libraries. It is a question of the government having to find savings—or believing it has to find savings or telling us it has to find savings wherever it can, without telling us why.
I want first to address the issue of the lack of consultation. I think the government has a problem in that it sees consultation as always being something to do with talking to your opponents. The fact is that consultation can be a way of finding solutions to a problem. In this case there was a problem in that the government felt it did not have enough money to run the library service as it is. How about going to the community and talking about ways in which the library service could still answer people’s needs and money could be saved? We could also look at other areas where money could be saved, but, if money has to be taken from the library sector, let us look at that. In terms of consultation done by the consultants themselves, there was half a day. I imagine that was half a day spent talking to the bureaucrats who supervised the study.
I believe there has been confusion about appropriate places for libraries. Mr Hargreaves has called upon a planning hierarchy in which he sees town centres as the place where libraries should be. Patently that is not the case now. We have just had a new library built in Kippax. I know it is an intermediate town centre, but it is not the town centre of the Ginninderra district or Belconnen. Nor are Erindale or
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