Page 1924 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 May 2010
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One of the great problems we have in the court system in the ACT at the moment is forum shopping. We are going to create another tier which will only exacerbate forum shopping. Some people in the legal fraternity think that, with the right sort of consultation and the right resources, which are not there now, it may possibly work. But it is interesting that the attorney put out a discussion paper about access to justice. He is prepared to discuss everything in the discussion paper except this major initiative. It is typical of the Stanhope government and its incapacity to take the community with it.
As a member for Ginninderra, I cannot let my time go by without commenting on the provision of services in my electorate. I do not know what it is but Belconnen is always the poor cousin, the ugly sister, in a Stanhope government budget. You have to really scratch around to find if there is anything in there for Belconnen. It is the same this year. We have talked about the Flynn preschool. There is some good in that because we now know that the Stanhope government will not be bulldozing the Flynn school. So we do have some certainty there. That is about it. We do not know what is going to happen with the rest of the Flynn school or the relationship with the John Flynn Community Group in implementing any changes that may happen there.
There is nothing in the budget for the Belconnen Arts Centre. There is no stage 2. There is nothing in the budget for the upgrading of the existing Belconnen theatre, which is left languishing. We do have the beginning of a transit way, which means that Mr Stanhope has started now to channel Mr Corbell on transport matters. There are some park benches and some seats at Lake Ginninderra and a little bit of money that will be welcomed by the Strathnairn homestead art centre. That is about it. Belconnen, as usual, gets very little indeed. One of the questions that we have to ask is: now that the government has changed the reporting on the land release program, are the blocks and the Hawker shops in the commercial release? It is unclear from the land release program whether or not they are. There are many problems with this budget which will be further explored by the Liberal opposition in coming days.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (4.55): I would like to start today by discussing the implications of this budget on the issue of climate change in the ACT over the next financial year. It has been interesting to note that the media narrative has been that climate change has taken a back seat in this budget, and it is true that this budget does not give a clear indication of how the ACT plans to turn around the ACT’s growing greenhouse emissions.
While it is blatantly obvious that I do not think that there should be any de-prioritisation of climate change and energy issues, I find it hard to believe that the government could justify this either. The Greens will be expecting the government to deliver on a number of climate, energy and sustainability initiatives in the next 12 to 18 months. These must be initiatives that will drive the ACT to substantially reducing its emissions by 2020. By definition, then, they must be substantial, and some of them are going to require government resourcing. I look forward to seeing that reflected in next year’s budget.
Only $2.6 million of new spending has been allocated to the climate change department over four years. Just to break that down, that is around $650,000 per year
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