Page 2169 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 22 June 2010
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This must really hurt Mr Stanhope. This is a document that he would have been putting a lot of personal pride in. This is a document that he thought was going to get a good front-pager for him. This is a document that he would have personally invested in, where he could say that he was still a man of vision. It went from being a positive story of the day to a two-day negative story. Why? Because the first day the many spelling mistakes in it were covered and the second day the Canberra Times covered the actual quality and content of the document.
This document is not too dissimilar to many of the other state Labor documents when it comes to infrastructure. What do they do? They put their budget into a document like this and they have some grandiose schemes that they put into a document like this, and there is not much in between. There is not much by way of a genuine plan. There is not much by way of a genuine vision for Canberra’s infrastructure needs. What this document does is give a rehash of budget initiatives that are either under construction or are to be under construction and then talk about a few pie-in-the-sky ideas that Mr Stanhope will never need to be held accountable for.
Moving to the contents page—page 3, “infrastructure investment”. How seriously can the government prioritise future infrastructure investment when they cannot even spell it correctly? I wonder how seriously they take the Alexander Maconochie Centre when they misspell it a couple of different times in different ways. I wonder just how influential the Canberra plan really was when there is not even a “t” in “influential”. I wonder what they really think of the good people of Belconnen and Tuggeranong when they do not even spell them correctly. I know Madam Assistant Speaker Dunne takes a lot of pleasure in making sure that our great English language is presented properly in the spoken word and also in writing. I know she too had a field day when it came to perusing this document and seeing just how incompetent this document is and how indicative it is of Mr Stanhope and his ministry.
Can you imagine if the opposition put out a media release which misspelt “Aboriginal”, “Maconochie”, “Belconnen”, “Gungahlin” or “Tuggeranong”? Imagine what would happen then. Imagine the hypocrisy then. Mr Stanhope would be on his hobbyhorse. He would be high and mighty, telling us all that we were incompetent. Yet here we have a document which is meant to be the pride of his government, where he can hold his head up high and say, “This is what Stanhope Labor is all about.” Instead—and we think it is what Stanhope Labor is all about—it is all smoke and mirrors and a real slapstick position.
In terms of the actual process and how this came about, I am really amazed that this was a document that was prepared in a central agency. Presumably it would go to multiple different organisations, multiple different branches and multiple different ministers and Treasury. It would go back and forth umpteen times. It would go before the minister’s desk. He would be able to have a look at it and then send it back. It would come back again as another draft and he would send it back. It would go through the motions umpteen times. Yet it does not appear that anyone has actually read this report.
When I went through this report with my pink highlighter and spotted a few obvious problems, it might well have been the first time anyone had actually read this
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