Page 175 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 6 March 2007
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MR HARGREAVES: There you go, up again another octave. Come on, go up another octave.
Mr Smyth: No, that’s fine. I was here at 10.30.
MR HARGREAVES: That’s good, another four octaves. You are doing well.
What Mr Mulcahy is doing is trying to stop this collective of businesspeople from putting their money—their money—into a special place where it can be hypothecated to projects that they want. Mr Mulcahy is supposed to be the opposition’s Treasury spokesman. He does not recognise that the more money you put into the bucket the greater the bang that you can get for it. He does not realise that you can get greater than the sum of the parts out of that. Of course, we can all spend five bucks each, but if 100 of us get together you can get a collective 500 bucks worth of goods. He does not appreciate that. What he says is that a couple of people in Civic have said to him, “I don’t want to pay this. No, get that other bloke to pay it, or get the government to do it.”
What is happening is that there is a collective of very responsible businesspeople out there saying, “If we put all of our money into one bucket, we can do some really good things around improving the look of our businesses.” They are saying to Mr Corbell, “Can you come up with a process whereby we can collectively put our money in and collectively get it out?” Mr Corbell has said, “Yes, I can I can do that. Understand, though, that it is not my money. We are not going to take it. We are not going to take the money.” Mr Corbell is saying, “It is not our money. Understand that all we are doing is giving you an open and transparent process whereby you can spend your own money on projects of your own choosing.”
The graffiti one is a very good example of that. We do a certain amount of work on it. People have to walk past this dirty stuff all the time. But if the businesses in that area choose to do so, they can. If they choose not to, they do not have to. When Mr Pratt was waxing eloquent about all of this graffiti stuff in the city, he arranged for John Hanna to give us all a tickle-up because of loathsome graffiti in a laneway. When I went and had a look at it I found that on one side of the laneway there was a very nice mural. Did the graffiti experts have a crack at that? No, they did not. Why? They do not touch each other’s artwork. He pointed to the dirty bit, being a bit inconsistent, as I said at the time. I went back only about a week ago and had a look. Guess what: on the other wall there is now a mural and no graffiti on it. But what is Mr Hanna’s view on that? He does not like the mural. He would like to put it back; he would like to have it back. Heaven only knows.
The people in the adjacent buildings are happy because there is no graffiti on that wall any more. If they wished to apply their money collectively to paying for that mural, good on them. The original one on the other side of the wall was, in fact, paid for by the property owner in the same way that Mr Mulcahy advocates, but the property owner on the other side of the laneway was far less responsible, was far more irresponsible, in terms of the projection of the quality of that particular building. If the people collectively want to do something about that, fine, but they are going to be in
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