Page 1662 - Week 05 - Thursday, 8 May 2008
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Let us have a look at this revelation in today’s Daily Telegraph by Labor insiders about their own mean spiritedness and their cunning back flips. I refer to the quote in the article today from a Labor senior staffer:
The trick is to sell back-flips as responding to community concerns.
Unquote, comrade! That is what is said behind closed doors in Labor corridors. That is their strategy to retain any semblance of credibility with the community. The list of these back flips is long.
Tharwa Bridge: look at the cost caused to that whole community and that whole community’s heart and soul. The way that community was treated by this government is the greatest example of mean spiritedness I have ever seen—firstly, with the threats to close the bridge, then partially reopen it, and then discussions about whether they would restore or whether they would not restore, whether they would pull the bridge down or build a concrete memorial bridge to John Hargreaves—and all through this, that community has suffered.
The incompetence on the part of this government which caused that pain to that community is a hallmark of the way this government governs. Then we saw the back flip, the back flip dressed up as “it looks like we have found a whole new lot of engineering evidence” when they damn well knew the engineering evidence that was available to them.
Then we have hospital pay parking. It cost us over $500,000. That is also a case of mean spiritedness. Here we have the government squeezing the visitors to the hospital until they bleed. That was what that policy work was all about. And then another back flip! After 2½ years of constant questioning, we have the scrapping of the FireLink project, at a cost of over $5 million lost and nothing to show for it.
Then we have the roadside drug-testing trial—three years behind the rest of the country, five years after the government’s own website identified the risk of drug-affected driving in the territory. The cost is the safety of residents, at the risk of impinging on human rights.
What about the mean spirited closing of the Griffith library? To quote the minister that day when he stood on those steps, on a fine Saturday morning, in front of about 200 residents: “I didn’t bother speakin’ to youse because I knew what youse’d say. So I just went ahead and closed it.” Fair dinkum!
What is the strategy of this government? You push through or bust. And if critical mass in opposition is met in the community, and only after of course the community has woken up because you have been trying to shove things beneath the radar, then you back flip and pretend the back flip is a consequence of newfound wisdom.
Let us have a look at the Emergency Services Agency. There has been waste on all fronts in emergency services and no hope of ever catching up with that spending that saw $26 million disappear into the ether. The ultimate result is that we are no better
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