Page 423 - Week 01 - Thursday, 11 December 2008
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supporting tourism, hospitality and retail. As Mr Smyth would be aware, there is a strong correlation with those industries. The success of the tourism industry feeds into the success of hospitality and retail. An argument that is put quite consistently in the business tourism sector and in the visiting friends and relatives sector, as well as the pleasure and education tourism sectors, is that if you are able to attract people to the city then their capacity to go to restaurants, to go to our hotels, to spend money in our shops is enhanced. That is a good thing. I do not hear anyone opposing this. So that is the basis for this particular—
Mr Seselja: No-one else has taken the full 10 minutes.
MR BARR: If I had not been interrupted so many times, I would have been able to wrap up on that note. Finally, in relation to cycling infrastructure and the comments from Mr Coe, he, being a new member of this place, may not be aware that the department, the government and organisations like Pedal Power have undertaken a significant amount of work in identifying what Pedal Power have called “the missing links” within our cycling network, and this additional funding will go to address some of the issues associated with those missing links.
Mr Seselja: What are the missing links? What are they?
Mrs Dunne: What are they?
Mr Hargreaves: Go and read the report.
MR BARR: There are a number of areas around the city. Go and read the report; it is available. It will involve some infrastructure work in terms of maintaining some of the paths that, over time, have fallen into disrepair, and it will also involve signage.
Subclauses 7(7) and 7(8) agreed to.
Subclauses 7(9) and 7(10).
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (9.08): We have got the relocation and fit-out of the Mitchell Customer Service Centre. That, to me, looks a pretty reasonable amount for a fit-out but it is really difficult to know because we do not know any detail on how big the fit-out is. It seems low; fit-outs are pretty expensive these days.
Maybe the minister could tell us what kind of square metres we are talking about and whether this is reasonable value for money. It seems not a large amount for a fit-out but once again this is one of the challenges we are facing here without actually being able to ask a lot of detailed questions. So perhaps the minister can help us out in responding.
The other thing that struck me about this is the Dickson master plan and the Kingston master plan. They seem to have almost identical descriptors but one is a bit over $110,000 over two years and one is $200,000 in the first year. Perhaps the minister could explain to us whether the Kingston town centre master plan is more extensive, whether it is looking at different things, because the descriptors do not give us any clue as to why one is $200,000 and one is $110,000.
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