Page 134 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 February 2010
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serious analysis of these results—significant and weighty questions—you have to do so with some academic rigour. That would be preferable to the sensationalist press-release style of this motion by the Liberal Party today. There has been no genuine scholarly approach to this motion, and the Greens do not believe that it is a sincere attempt to critique the results of the report.
The Greens will be expecting the government to clearly articulate how they will address many of the issues raised in the report. We do not believe the government have effectively communicated to the public how improvements have been made since the collection of data in the report or how they intend to address the measures which the ACT clearly has room to improve on.
The approach by the Liberal Party today will not serve the people of the ACT to gain a realistic and accurate explanation from the government as to how they intend to improve on the results in the report. It does not serve the constituents of this Assembly to cherry-pick pieces of data from the report and sensationalise statistics. It will not produce a genuine picture of services in the ACT.
I will say that it is incumbent upon the government to make an honest appraisal of the results from the report, and the Greens will be expecting each minister to report regularly to the Assembly and to the Canberra community. We do have a number of forums coming up, such as estimates, where we expect there will be clear explanations regarding what progress has been made. The Greens cannot support a motion such as this today as it does not present an accurate and well-considered request to the Assembly.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (10.49): Mr Speaker, I have never heard such an amazing list of excuses for yet again selling out the people of Canberra. The Greens ran on the premise that they would be third party insurance. They would hold the government to account. They would, perhaps, undertake scholarly work so they could back up their arguments with the facts. But if you look at the data that is contained in the ROGS report, it does not offer an analysis, and rightly so. It does not offer a commentary; it just puts the data and the facts there. There is no doubt that this motion is required today, and there is no doubt that this motion should be supported by the Greens.
Instead of some scholarly analysis from the convenor of the Greens, all we got was a list of excuses as to yet again why they will sell out to the people of the ACT; why they will simply let the government off the hook; why they do not want to get into the detail and analyse what is in this report. If you do go into the report and if you do some analysis—hopefully in a scholarly way, but who is to define what a scholar is—then you will realise that this motion is accurate and this motion is worthy of support.
What this motion does is outline another insight into the poor performance of the Stanhope-Gallagher government. What it does is comprehensively indict the government on what it has failed to achieve. I agree with Ms Hunter on one thing—that is, this report does not make judgements about policy areas dealt with in the report. The report provides detailed analysis of various policy areas with tables that provide extensive statistical insights into each policy area. What that means is that it is
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