Page 2488 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 1 July 2008
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
within 600 metres of residences! So much for this government’s consultation, and the rest we know about.
The Leader of the Opposition spoke at some length about the fait accompli decision on the Tharwa bridge. I think I advised him that this has been going on for two years, but really it is almost a three-year debacle. The preliminary phase in 2005-06 saw the bridge closed, reopened, closed, a bit of strengthening, a bit of light traffic and hemming and hawing about what to do about the bridge while keeping the community entirely in the dark.
They did not consult metre by metre with the Tharwa community about what options might be available for that bridge. Then, in about October 2006, the minister turned up at the Tharwa community. It was one of his few visits, by the way, to the Tharwa community. He turned up there in October 2006 and said: “Gee, you guys, this bridge is about to fall into the river. We need a concrete bridge.” What he did not say, of course, was that he wanted to build an icon—a concrete memorial to himself and his glorious Chief Minister. The motive overrode any sensible attempt to consult; there was little prior consultation.
By 2007 the community of Tharwa had accepted the minister’s advice that they had no choice but to have a concrete bridge, although that decision split the community. Half the community still really believed that that bridge could have been restored. Tensions were created by no prior consultation and bad leadership by the minister and the government. Finally, it became quite clear that the engineering evidence indicated that the bridge could have been restored—that if the right decisions had been made in the first place, if careful analysis had occurred and they had listened to the engineering and heritage council advice, they could well have come to a better decision much earlier and put the community out of its misery. One has to wonder, indeed, whether they deliberately dragged the chain to save the budget. I suspect there was a bit of that involved, too.
The Leader of the Opposition went quite carefully through one of the worst examples of no consultation—the Griffith library saga. I was actually a witness on the day that the minister, the same hapless minister that we have seen with his fingers all over the bridge affair, stood there on a Saturday morning and said to about 200 people, “Well, we knew what youse would say, so why would we bother to consult?” They knew what the answer would be, so they did not bother to consult. What a statement to make to the community. What sort of confidence does that give a community that this is a government fair dinkum about consultation?
All these bald statements that we have heard here today about what a wonderful government they are for consulting is just so much dust in the wind. It is a sham process. If they are talking about consultation this month it is only because we are three months out from an election and their own polling has shown that they have got a disastrous reputation for consultation and that for the last 3½ years they have taken the community for granted. This is a government that knows better. This is a government of experts and mates—old Labor mates—and they know better than you, the community. “Take what you get, community, because we will tell you what you can have and we will play the game around that.”
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .