Page 3900 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 25 August 2010
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Jon Stanhope comes in here and tells us that we should be grateful. More offensively, he tells the people of Kambah that they should be grateful for what they have been given. We reject Jon Stanhope’s disdain for the people of Tuggeranong. We can talk about Kambah in this case, but we have seen it over the years, haven’t we? We have seen how the people of Tuggeranong have been treated by this government. We could go to the examples. Their schools were closed when they were told they would not be. This is the Chief Minister who tried to put a power station in their backyard. That is what he thinks of the people of Tuggeranong. If he was not trying to put a prison or a dragway in their backyard, he was trying to put a power station in their backyard.
You have got to ask: what is it about the people of Tuggeranong that has done so much to offend this government and this Chief Minister? We have this tirade again today against the people of Kambah, when effectively he says, “Well, what do you want? We put some money into it like 10 years ago.” Ten years ago they put some money in, apparently. He says, “Go down to Kambah. It’s fantastic.” I do not know when the Chief Minister last went down to Kambah or the Tuggeranong Valley, but when you go to Kambah you see it.
I again commend Mr Smyth for bringing this forward. The point that he makes is absolutely right. Kambah is a critical group centre. It is our biggest suburb—the biggest suburb in Canberra. I go down to Kambah shops and I see that, in the context of the shops nearby and the population there, what the people of Kambah have in that centre is not good enough. It has one of the smallest Woolies in Canberra. Yet there is a lot of potential.
Mr Smyth is doing the hard work of a local member who goes and listens and says, “Well, yes. We can do something.” Is it a priority? Well, yes, it is a priority because we have got Canberra’s biggest suburb being poorly serviced by its local centre, its group centre. There is no doubt about it. I do not think anyone is going to get up in here and say that the Kambah group centre is as we would expect for a suburb the size of Kambah. There is no doubt about it.
I lived in the area in my early days and not much has changed in Kambah Village since the 1980s. Not much has changed from when the demographics of Kambah were very different. But we still have a significant population base there. We now have an older population, which in many ways relies even more on good local services.
Mr Barr: That’s a considerable concession from you, Zed, on an older population in Kambah.
MR SESELJA: What was that, I am sorry?
Mr Barr: That’s a very big concession you’ve just made.
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Conversations will cease, please, gentlemen.
MR SESELJA: This is an important motion which does a number of things. Firstly, it acknowledges that local services or local grassroots work is core business for this
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