Page 1451 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 June 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
I hope that the government will not allow things to go bad and then, in their usual style, throw their hands in the air and say, “Well, it is so bad, we cannot fix it.” I hope they are going to work really hard. Mr Hargreaves laughs.
Mr Hargreaves: That is amazing.
MRS BURKE: It is amazing, is it not, that you would—
Mr Hargreaves: You are amazing.
MRS BURKE: It is amazing that you would laugh at that. I think the electrical issues at the Albert Hall need to be looked at. For example, there is a serious problem with electrical circuitry.
Mr Mulcahy: It is a fire hazard.
MRS BURKE: We have a real problem. Mr Mulcahy has mentioned fire issues. What are we doing to address that in order to protect the user groups that are using it at the moment? This should not be an excuse to say, “It is all too hard for the government. We need commercial operators in.”
I commend this motion to the house. I commend what has been said by Mr Pratt and Mr Mulcahy. We need to make sure that our Albert Hall remains our Albert Hall.
MR PRATT (Brindabella) (11.39): I thank my colleagues the shadow heritage minister, Mr Mulcahy, and the shadow planning minister, Mr Seselja, who both spoke quite passionately about this issue. I also thank Jacqui Burke. I thank my three erstwhile Molonglo MLA colleagues, who at least know how to genuinely represent their community on this priority matter, the Albert Hall.
I need to address a couple of issues. Firstly, we did not ask Dr Foskey of the Greens to withdraw her motion. We would have welcomed Dr Foskey putting her motion on the table today. That would have just added more power to the engineering of a very important debate on a very important issue. So it is absolutely disingenuous for Dr Foskey to bleat and moan because, in fact, she chose to withdraw her motion.
She has grabbed the opportunity, in a most crass and opportunistic way, to put up a new and most dubious motion on the refugee subject, the SIEV X disaster. She chose to do that. By the way, it is a motion which is greatly ill-advised, but that is another matter. Dr Foskey’s choice to drop a fundamental grassroots community issue such as the Albert Hall in favour of a national interest issue speaks volumes about Dr Foskey’s real priorities, and I find that extremely disappointing.
We should make sure that the residents of Molonglo are not misled by Dr Foskey and the Greens about being here to represent the best interests of the community. That is simply not the case with the Greens, as we have seen illustrated here today. The Greens are really here to misuse their place in the Assembly to pursue their batty national and international interest issues. The Albert Hall today is dispensable in the eyes of the Greens. Dr Foskey’s complaint that we did not consult with her and
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .