Page 3836 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 4 December 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
way; but at the end of the day this is a bill which the Assembly should support. I think that members have already acknowledged that. They do support it; they support it because it delivers better services for the Canberra community. That is what the community wants: it wants better services; it wants the delivery of services that make our city a fairer place, a safer place, a more accessible place and a more sustainable place. That is exactly what this bill delivers. I commend it to the Assembly.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (11.57): This is an important bill. I think that there is a certain sensitivity on the government benches because Mr Corbell was so quick to rise to his feet and say, “Gee whiz, it sounds like you don’t support anything in this bill.” Obviously he did not listen to anything that Mr Stefaniak said in the preceding speech where he pointed to places, particularly in Mr Corbell’s portfolio, and praised what was going on, saying that he was looking forward to particular initiatives. But we do not hear that from Mr Corbell; he just has to have an opportunity to jibe.
There is opportunity in these debates to point to the way that we would do things differently. It is not to say that there is anything necessarily wrong with some of these initiatives but in many ways it is the difference between the way a Labor government would do something and the way a Liberal government would do something; we have different approaches to providing services for the people of the ACT. Mr Mulcahy addressed that in some way by pointing out that we would have a different taxing policy.
We would be more inclined to leave the money in the pockets of the people of the ACT so that they can provide the services for themselves. That is not to say that there are not essential services that must be provided by a government, and those things are about how a government sets its priorities. What the Liberal opposition has been saying for a substantial number of years is that the ACT government, the Stanhope government, has got its priorities wrong.
An example is the one that Mr Mulcahy used, which is the proportion of public works funding that goes to public art. We see this every day we are on Gungahlin Drive as we are starting to use it more and more. We have got the bogong moth sculpture. I know where it is and I have been told that if you look at it from above you can see that it is a bogong moth, but there is very little on the ground to distinguish the bogong moth from any other random pile of rocks.
Then we have the scrap metal confusion of the overpass on Gungahlin Drive over the Barton Highway, which I draw to the Assembly’s attention because I am concerned about the traffic safety issue. We have got a whole lot of steel girders jutting out at random angles and there is no traffic barrier between those steel girders and the road, and the distance between the edge of the road and these steel girders is very small indeed.
We saw in the past how the South Australian government had to do away with the Stobie poles and phase them out because of the impact of having steel girders close to the side of the road; when cars run into them they cause considerable damage, and more damage than you would normally expect in an accident of that magnitude. I draw the attention of the minister to the proximity of this steel girder configuration to
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .