Page 1346 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 25 March 2009
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MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Mrs Dunne, can you get to the point.
MRS DUNNE: She was smoked out the other day.
Ms Porter: On a point of order, Madam Assistant Speaker: relevance.
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER: I cannot find the relevance. Can you get to the point, Mrs Dunne.
MRS DUNNE: The point is that this is an important constituency matter and Ms Porter has form on the way that she deals with constituency matters. What she has done here today is basically come down on the side of the government, on the side of Roads ACT, what Roads ACT wants to do, rather than on what the people of Nicholls might want for their shops.
Madam Assistant Speaker, you may not be aware of the Nicholls shops because you live on the other side of town, and that is reasonable. The Nicholls shops entrance and egress are a nightmare. After seven years of Stanhope government, when this is Jon Stanhope’s own constituency, his own electorate, the proposals put forward are preposterous.
We actually have the situation where we are going to create one-way traffic flows. One-way traffic flows are often a solution. The solution put forward by the Stanhope government is to have all the traffic exit through a very narrow residential street which was designed to take half a dozen cars an hour. The solution will be a mess. And it is only because the Liberal members for Ginninderra are taking up the issues and addressing the issues that after seven-odd years something might happen.
Ms Porter turns up there every now and again with her mobile office; she stands for a little while and leaves again. And she says that that is consultation. I have had people talk to me about Ms Porter’s consultation.
Mr Coe: A sham consultation.
MRS DUNNE: It was a sham consultation, where they ask you to do things. She writes a letter to the responsible minister and that absolves her of doing anything else. She never takes up the cudgels. She never goes to the Chief Minister or one of her ministers and says, “We have got a problem here; fix it.” She never uses the ability that she should have in the Labor Party to really take up the cudgels for it. She is a post box.
What we have seen here today and what we saw in the recent issue in relation to Hawker is that Ms Porter cannot work out what the solution could be, not even to the extent of saying, “How about we sit down and talk with the community,” until somebody else in this Assembly raises the issue. And suddenly, there she is, all ready to fix the issue. But in the meantime Ms Porter has been the apologist for Roads ACT and their flawed plan to fix—
Mr Stanhope: How many votes did you get in the last election, Vicki?
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