Page 1888 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 May 2010
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And $26.3 million on the arboretum: I am sure some like the idea. But we are surrounded by the Brindabellas. And no-one could call it a core service. I am sure that ACTCOSS would love even a fraction of that amount for core community services.
We would not have hundreds of thousands on artwork on the side of the GDE instead of finishing the road. We would not have funded the Grassby statue, the prison artwork or spent the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that the government spend on telling us just how good they are. That is what we would do differently.
Mr Speaker, if we from opposition can find savings of tens of millions of dollars just from the headlines provided by this government, how can anyone claim that there is no waste—worse still, absurd waste? I am sure when we drill down we will find more examples, just as we did in all the previous budgets this government has presented.
There are other areas I would like to address. There are places where we should be spending but which the government has ignored. Recently, I visited a number of homeless shelters in the region. Many of these shelters are regularly turning people away. The $100,000-plus which the government waste every year on its propaganda newsletter would be a godsend, allowing them to give shelter to more people.
I met recently with the Women’s Legal Centre, which gives legal advice to vulnerable women in our community. The centre does a fantastic job on a shoestring budget and receives very little support from the ACT government. I, along with many in the community, resent the wasting of money on twisted pieces of metal beside the GDE instead of providing more funding to vulnerable women.
These are questions that need to be answered and issues that must be addressed. We have put these issues on our agenda as a direct result of doing the hard work of alternative policy development. And we are doing it in a constructive way—not with this government, but with the people who really count: the community.
Our community consultations across a range of portfolio areas have started and the positive ideas we will be promoting are based on a sound understanding of the principles that actually drive communities and economies—ideas like the Infrastructure Canberra Bill that will give the territory the plan to move forward and the legislative authority to do so independently of the political cycle.
I announced in my budget reply last year that we would move forward with our territory master plan, called “concept Canberra”, and the hard work behind it is creating tangible proof of that concept being turned into a reality. This is just the first part of concept Canberra as an alternative vision for our city but an important one and one that should already be in place but which is once again another example of wasted opportunity for reform that this government has failed to address.
Another idea is Jeremy Hanson’s health forums, which have had exceptional uptake and valuable input from a range of industry and community groups and which have provided a level of bilateral dialogue sorely missing in the management of public health under this government. You can see further hard work in the substantial and
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