Page 1941 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 25 June 2008
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shareholder and as a community representative he had made any judgements about the merit of this proposal he replied that that was not for him to do. Yet only moments later he said:
The government has been fully supportive of this particular proposal and project, and remains so. Our support has been evident from the outset.
How are the people of Canberra to understand where the Chief Minister’s loyalties lie when confronted with these kinds of contradictions?
I recently had cause to go the Bega Valley Shire Council, one of the 17 shires and local government areas that form the Capital Region. They also are a little bit annoyed that no great emphasis is placed any more by this government on that region. But there was a document there about—guess what—a gas-fired power station. A $150 million project, 190 watts, which was going to be situated some 7.5 kilometres from Bega to the south west. The council had an A4 fold-out document with pictures, maps, a time frame of when it was all going to happen subject to community consultation, and other things. I think the process was meant to start in 2006 and to be up and running by August 2008.
I asked one of the staff what happened to the project. It was not killed off because of any problems with the consultation process. It had been clearly set out in this document which was available and given out to the community. What killed the project was apparently the trouble of getting the gas pipeline to go over the Brown Mountain and the costs which the proponent and the New South Wales government decided was prohibitive, so the project went elsewhere.
What if the government had just simply been as honest as the Bega Valley Shire Council and put out a document like that at the start of this process, saying, “This is what we would like. Here are some of the sites. Here is what it is going to do for Canberra. Here’s a proposed time frame”? What if it had taken the people into its confidence and done it properly rather than all the obfuscation and all the scurrying around it has done since this all came to notice far down the track from when it actually started?
Let me finish, Mr Speaker, by noting that we in this city have a Chief Minister heading a government that is quick to put paid to its own ideas and philosophies. We have a Chief Minister who cannot be consistent in his evidence, either because he is not sufficiently across the detail or because he holds the estimates committee and, through it, the Assembly in some kind of contempt. We have a Chief Minister who refuses to acknowledge the intelligence of the people of Canberra and their willingness and their eagerness to be involved in the process of decision making on matters of concern to them, especially matters as fundamental as this and matters of such importance to the territory.
We have a Chief Minister and a government who are so arrogant as to think that they are above democracy and our systems of parliament. Finally, Mr Speaker, we have a Chief Minister and government who are proving every day now that they are thoroughly out of touch with what ordinary Canberrans want. The motion should be supported.
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