Page 2959 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 6 August 2008
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What about sport and rec? Again, they suffered cuts. That was a good investment in building a better city and a stronger community! At a time when we have growing childhood obesity and major concerns about the health of all Canberrans, what do we do? We cut the natural preventative measure of sport and rec. That is it. Critical to this was Healthpact. Ms Porter spoke about Healthpact. I thought you had a lot of gall speaking about Healthpact. “We shut down Healthpact, the independent authority. We dragged it back into the arms of the department.” And what is the first decision? The funding for the Capitals to run an antismoking body image program among young Canberra women is cut.
This is probably the country’s premier female sports team—certainly one of Canberra’s most successful female sports teams—and you cut the funding to help them help young women address body image and stop them from smoking. That is a seriously good investment in the future, isn’t it! We cut the most effective vehicle—successful young women talking to other young women about how they should look and feel and about whether or not they should smoke. What do you do? You cut it. That is an investment in the future! That is an outstanding investment!
People remember that. People do remember these things—trivially small amounts of money in the context of the budget, but huge amounts of money for community groups. People remember that particular cut, particularly in women’s circles, and what it said about this government’s commitment to the health of young women in the territory. That is a sterling investment in building a better city and a stronger community for all, Ms Porter! I thank you for reminding me to mention Healthpact to you again.
Then there is the failure to invest in business—the absolute failure to invest in diversifying the economic base of the ACT. There is $1.6 billion of revenue above what they expected to receive—a billion and a half dollar boom. It is on the back of the property market, mind you, but there is a billion and a half dollars. What have we got to show for it? Over the last few years, absolutely nothing. The taxes continue to go up; they are piled on the backs of the people of the ACT. But for the government to have the gall to talk to us about the importance of government investment in building a better city and a stronger community for all Canberrans and for Ms Porter to try to laud what this government has done is just appalling.
The list just goes on. In March last year suddenly the Chief Minister discovered climate change. It was the decision of the century. This was amazing. He had discovered climate change. After having abandoned our climate change strategy—which I remind members was the first climate change strategy in the country and the first one to have a strategy imprinted out there which people could work by—the Chief Minister finally found climate change. After years of not investing in environmental sustainability in the ACT, he is rapidly playing catch-up.
But the Chief Minister suffers from the burden of the albatross of the ACT, Mr Hargreaves. Mr Hargreaves is responsible for projects like no waste by 2010. When it was started in the late 1990s by the previous government, 2010 led the world in attitudinal change amongst residents in cities. There are now no-waste networks
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