Page 576 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 14 March 2007
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the Mackay family issued a statement saying it did not approve of the memorial, and that it had been “heartened by groundswell of community anger at this proposal”.
Hargreaves defended the decision, but over-egged the pudding by suggesting that Grassby, like John F. Kennedy, should be judged solely on his achievements and not be the subject of constant carping and fault-finding. Hargreaves was at it again on the radio yesterday, invoking no less than Abraham Lincoln as another politician whose foibles had (rightly) been overlooked by an adoring American public—just as those critics of Grassby should get with the program.
Whatever Hargreaves might think about the importance of the Grassby legacy, his obsession with immortalising a divisive figure from the political past is making him and his Government look foolish. Erecting expensive monuments to dead worthies is an anachronism, but if we must do it there are plenty of candidates more deserving than Al Grassby.
I do not think anyone would dispute the contribution that Al Grassby made in terms of multiculturalism or in terms of helping people from an ethnic background. But the Canberra Times editorial is probably quite a good summation of the concerns that have been expressed about this. Canberrans discussing the statue are overwhelmingly candid. One put on an internet forum:
When Stanhope falls we should take Grassby’s statue and install it outside the gates of the Alexander Maconochie Centre.
Mr Hargreaves has said that the figure of Al, with bronze arms outstretched, is supposed to “provide a welcome message to all the people coming to Canberra”. I would humbly suggest that taking proactive action, Mr Hargreaves, to reduce high property taxes would be a much better welcome, or maybe reopening the Griffith library, or perhaps reversing the cutback in library opening hours, or reopening some closed schools. Maybe a Civic shopfront would be a better welcome—or perhaps something as simple as just cleaning up the city would make a great start, as the government apparently cannot afford to maintain the city to its previous high standard.
Let us face it: this is probably just another political stunt by this government to glorify all things Labor, even if they have to exaggerate it or invent achievement in doing so. Perhaps there is also a bit of a tilt too at the Howard government here and it is this government’s way of deflecting attention from their own gross failures at management.
I am not going to go into too much about who founded multiculturalism or whatever. The actual term was coined in 1968 by George Zubrzycki, as my colleague Mr Smyth pointed out, and it continued under the Whitlam government and then of course under the Fraser government.
It seems that the Stanhope government are simply not interested in what they see as the pedestrian business of providing basic services like roads, schools, libraries and hospitals. The statue is one of the many vanity projects of this government. The Chief Minister and his ministers behave sometimes like 18th century grandees, splurging public moneys on their own pet projects while leaving the population with fewer and fewer basic services and amenities.
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