Page 1566 - Week 04 - Thursday, 25 March 2010
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anybody on the GDE that the government should be bragging about their capital works. You tell anyone around Glenloch interchange that the government should be bragging about capital works. You tell anyone on Lanyon Drive that the government should be bragging about capital works. You tell anyone trying to go from Hackett, Watson, Downer, Dickson or Ainslie that the government should be bragging about capital works.
Because we do not have the arterial roads to divert traffic from the minor suburban roads we get so many rat-runs in Canberra, especially in the inner north. If we do not invest properly in infrastructure and we do not spend our money properly then we are going to get situations like we currently have where everyone in Canberra is affected by this government’s poor record when it comes to capital works.
This is very relevant to open, honest and accountable government. The whole GDE saga is very much relevant to open, accountable and transparent government. This government refuses to actively take part in community consultation. It refuses to listen to concern and it refuses to plan for the future. If this government was proud of its track record of honest and accountable government then I do not think we would need such a huge ad buy that we currently have by the Stanhope Labor government.
There is, of course, more. There is no shortage of things to talk about in such an MPI. The Freedom of Information Act, I think, is another classic one brought about because of Mrs Dunne’s fierce advocacy for this act. The FOI reform that we have passed in this Assembly was simply because the opposition said what the government was doing was wrong and we had to change it. I commend Mrs Dunne for getting that important piece of legislation through this place. It is relevant in particular because of the data that was suppressed around the time of the school closures.
When the government began closing schools in 2006 it was Jon Stanhope who raised to an art form the suppression of information and getting around the FOI legislation. He famously suppressed the functional review written by Costello, a document which supposedly provided the original basis for the school closures. That document has still not seen the light of day. I do not think we ever will see that document.
The worst abuse of FOI laws that I think we have seen in this place has to be about this government’s misuse of conclusive certificates. These certificates were intended to be used in exceptional circumstances to protect documents that are so sensitive that even the reviewer should not see them—things such as national security matters. However, the government have totally abused that power in a way which has meant that so many Canberra families have suffered. They have unduly suffered because they have not been able to see the evidence to support Mr Stanhope’s political decision. This was a decision, incidentally, that they said they would not take before the 2004 election.
Of course, there is the Tuggeranong power station. I am sure my colleague Mr Doszpot will be talking about this issue a little bit later on. The suppression of information about the Tuggeranong power station and, again, the government’s inability to consult properly on this issue—as I said earlier, the way they maximised their art form way of suppressing information—are also on display with regard to the
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