Page 3460 - Week 09 - Thursday, 20 August 2009
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Mr Coe: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. The question was: will $5 million be enough to cover the shortcomings? The minister has not answered that.
MR SPEAKER: There is no point of order. Mr Stanhope, I trust you will come to Mr Coe’s question.
MR STANHOPE: Certainly. In order to answer that question, I need to give some explanation of the services that Territory and Municipal Services provides, and I am in the process of doing that, and having regard to the context in which they do provide them and the basis on which we make decisions about appropriate levels of resourcing. In that respect, the department involved itself in a yardstick benchmarking report as recently as 2007, which compares the municipal responsibilities of a number of jurisdictions around Australia—the major metropolitan cities in Australia and New Zealand. It reveals, for instance, the challenges we face vis-a-vis other cities. In all of the cities benchmarked, the ACT has the second highest amount of actively maintained reserve land.
We need to dwell on these things and reflect on them in order to understand the nature of the budget and the challenge. Here in the ACT, we maintain 17 hectares of reserve land for every 1,000 residents, and that land is actually maintained at the lowest operating cost of any jurisdiction surveyed in that benchmark, at $1,172 per hectare. By way of comparison, and it is reflective of the different reserve areas that we maintain as opposed to, say, Sydney, here in the territory, with 17 times more maintained reserve land than the City of Sydney, we maintain it at a cost of $1,172 per hectare as against a cost of $71,000 per hectare by the Sydney City Council. It gives some indication of the nature of the challenges that we face.
We have every expectation that TAMS will bring its budget down. It has no option but to do that. We have imposed a significant efficiency dividend on all departments. That applies to TAMS and it applies, of course, to Parks, Conservation and Lands. In addition, the government is just about to engage in a major community conversation in relation to how we deal with all the municipal services that the people of Canberra enjoy and have come to expect. How do we, in the context of the significant size of the issue, the level of service, change the way in which we manage services? Do we actually reduce the budget? Do we reduce services? Do we reduce the areas of maintained land? These are issues—
Mr Smyth: Relevance, Mr Speaker.
MR SPEAKER: He is talking about the portfolio. Mr Coe, a supplementary question?
MR COE: Minister, why has your department continued to have such a poor budget performance and when will you be tabling the Ernst and Young report?
MR STANHOPE: It is good to see Mr Coe is so on the mark. He has read the paper this morning and listened to the ABC. I think I have declared to everybody today and I think everybody in Canberra but poor Mr Coe knows that I will be tabling the report in about 10 minutes time. I love the rigour of your investigation and the brilliance of your political strategy, Mr Coe—sheer brilliance.
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