Page 3884 - Week 12 - Thursday, 23 November 2006
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decision, that report should be publicised to the community in sufficient time to allow the community to comment. That is what consultation means.
But here today we have seen this minister say, “Hang on, I responded to emails last week. I turned up at the rally on Saturday. I told them I was going to shut their library and they did not like that. That is consultation.” Surely the procedural definition of consultation around a government decision means dialogue with a community well in advance of a first or second draft decision being taken. Is that not what consultation means? Consultation simply does not mean communicating to the community after the event why you have taken a decision. Yes, that is an important communication exercise, but that is not consultation in the sense of an assessment that a government must take to undertake a particular decision which will impact on a component of the community. The minister today has shown that he has no idea what consultation means. Perhaps he has shown that because he does not give a toss about proper consultation with the community.
It is for all those reasons that the opposition sees fit to censure this minister today. He has shown his arrogance in the lead-up to the decision to close the library and certainly in the way that he treated the subject here today—in the full view and hearing, I might add, of the Griffith library action group. He would prefer to tread upon their sensibilities. He would prefer to trample them in the rush to decision making. That is why he deserves to be censured.
Let me go to another issue: the flawed Lunn report. If you look at the comparison activities, we have a very telling statistic: 77 per cent of the Griffith catchment area use the Griffith library. That in fact rates Griffith library at about No 2 on the list of communities and community participation in a local library. Now why would that factor not be a major determining factor in the future of that library? It should have been but it clearly was not. Let me make a comparison with Dickson library: 107 per cent of the catchment area. But again that statistic is flawed; it includes Gungahlin, which has, or is getting, its own library.
So what we see here is a load of spin and misleading statistics to underpin a flawed decision. Why was that decision taken? Merely because a decision was taken that a library had to be shut—not because that library should be shut, but a library had to be shut. How the hell for the inner south community—they are five, six, seven and, in some cases, eight kilometres from either the Woden or Civic libraries—can that be sensible planning? How is that community planning? How is that good governance in terms of providing those essential decentralised community services that a government has a responsibility to provide? As we have heard, in terms of the Chief Minister’s election 2004 campaign promise, libraries are the cornerstones of community life. Well, that particular principle has been shot down in flames.
The minister talked about wastage and about how we, the opposition, do not recognise the moves that he has taken to cut wastage in urban services. In urban services so far most of the wastage that we have seen is not simply the cuts in senior public service numbers in urban services; it has included a cut in the fire maintenance unit, the threat to cut the parks fire brigade, the cut of the ACT shopfront and now the Griffith library. So what we are seeing really are more cuts in front-line services than at the tail end of the functionality of urban services. What we want to see is a lot more cutting of the
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