Page 3880 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 4 December 2007
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“Purchase the Victorian tankers, please. We will do with one less tanker and we will wait a little bit longer to get them, but buy the right one.” (Time expired.)
MR SPEAKER: Order! The time for the discussion is concluded.
Appropriation Bill 2007-2008 (No 2)
Debate resumed.
MR PRATT (Brindabella) (4.27): Mr Speaker, I rise to talk about the government’s appropriation bill No 2. The opposition supports the government’s initiatives, because they are useful initiatives; they are reasonably well supported. But in these new initiatives the government says that it is seeking better services. It is saying that its initiatives in appropriation bill No 2 will allow them to pursue better services. The opposition maintains that the bulk of the initiatives simply reflect the government’s catching up on services and programs which have been allowed to run down in the last five or six years.
In this debate on the appropriation bill, I am going to focus fundamentally on transport—the initiatives taken in relation to transport. I noticed with some disappointment that Mr Corbell indicated earlier that the opposition were not being seen to support some of these initiatives. That is not correct. Most speakers on this side of the chamber that I have heard have acknowledged that most of these initiatives are reasonable and have said that we were not rejecting the government’s appropriation. Mr Corbell accused the opposition of political point scoring—“points of political point scoring” I think is the way that he put it.
But it is the opposition’s job, Mr Corbell. Okay, we are going to be supporting the appropriation, but let us point out to you that you are simply catching up. You have neglected services and programs over the last three or four years; therefore a lot of the initiatives that you have announced are simply plugging the holes which you created—which the government created through its mismanagement.
Let me demonstrate that by identifying the issue of security of bus interchanges. The failure of this government to act swiftly to address the violence and criminal activity at bus interchanges, especially given that they have appropriated funds for this, is inexcusable. Excuses on this issue come thick and fast from the minister, Minister Hargreaves. We saw his wave of excuses—his approach of ducking and weaving—clearly demonstrated in the hearings last week. In that hearing, we asked him why it was taking so damn long to do something about these bus interchanges—why the CCTV program, for instance, was taking a significant amount of time to be rolled out. He said this:
The timetable of the rollout is affected by the availability of equipment, a program for the equipment, the monitoring services, whether it is done by the interchange or whether it is done by the police—
whatever that means. He went on:
It is also governed by the creation of the privacy protocols …
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