Page 28 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 9 December 2008
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Everywhere one can look, one can see a litany of near or actual government disasters that represent poor value for taxpayer money, from the ludicrous busway, now thankfully on hold, to the almost as ludicrous single-lane Gungahlin Drive extension, which should have been built as a dual carriageway from the very beginning, and which was finally only brought about when the government panicked in the lead-up to the last election campaign.
I do not understand why, in a city the size of Canberra, the cost of a block of land 20 kilometres from the city centre is out of reach for the average Canberran; yet, if you drove into the city from that block, you would pass seemingly endless acres of undeveloped, underutilised paddocks. How could it be, in this city, that there is not enough land available for families to invest in their future? This government has escalated the cost of land in this town to a point where too many young Canberrans cannot afford to buy a home in the town they grew up in.
Furthermore, in our new suburbs, we have roads that are so narrow that they bear greater resemblance to an English country lane developed 500 years before the invention of the car than they do to roads that can have one car pass another without side-swiping the pedestrian on the footpath which was never built.
I want to see this Assembly focus on the real issues of concern to Canberrans. This Assembly should be discussing how to manage our hospitals better, how to deter people from committing crime, how to get better results in our schools, how to keep our taxes low, how to support employment in the ACT, the territory’s infrastructure needs, and the safety and security of our citizens. Unfortunately, this Assembly gets sidetracked with issues of little significance and forgets about the people we are here to represent. The taxpayers of Canberra deserve better than this.
I come to this place with a commitment to seek to change the priorities of this Assembly and return the focus of government back to core business. In the late 1980s, advocates of self-government for the territory lobbied hard to give Canberrans autonomy to run their own affairs through a parliamentary process with its own jurisdiction. They fought for transparency and accountability through a public chamber, committees and, most importantly, elections. This Assembly should be a trophy for that vision. Instead, what this Assembly has done is slowly erode the influence of voters by removing decisions from this place and entrusting them to the hands of bureaucrats, magistrates, judges, commissioners, executive directors, advocates, presidents and territory-owned corporations. What the Assembly has done, to a large extent, is to outsource the very rights the Assembly was meant to protect, to unelected, less accountable or even unaccountable bodies. I am not saying that I am against such legal arrangements; I am simply against having too many of them.
As a consequence of this outsourcing of responsibility, successive Assemblies have moved away from the core business of running the territory and have pottered around with insignificant projects while important business is left unattended.
It is with great regret that I believe that many Canberrans have lost confidence in this Assembly and say that we should just be a council or that we should go back under
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