Page 2751 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 28 June 2011
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I remind the government and the Liberal Party that the Greens have put forward various proposals and suggestions around these items. For instance, I released an active transport plan last year. Ms Bresnan released a paper last week concerning Gungahlin and some of the transport options there. I would request both Liberal and Labor to seriously consider the recommendations. They represent some new approaches to sustainable transport which the government and the Liberal Party are currently overlooking.
I note that earlier today the government gave its response to the community gardens motions and I am very pleased that generally the words in that were very positive. But, given that the number of community grants has increased and there is clearly a lot of public interest in this subject, why did the government decline to fund a support person to help coordinate the expansion of community gardens on the basis there were not sufficient requests for community gardens?
I am pleased that the issues I have raised in my motion are being addressed but it is frustrating that the government is commissioning a study on community gardens demand and benefit when clearly there is demand and benefit. It is doubly frustrating when we know that $40,000 goes a long way in the community sector and funding a part-time community gardens coordinator to work in the community sector would have made a huge difference on the ground. But it will not go very far if it is spent on consultants’ reports. Why do we not empower the community rather than empower yet another consultant?
Looking at the IT issues with ACTION buses, because Ms Bresnan has dealt with a lot of the other issues, as an ex IT professional I was fairly concerned that BPAY took five working days to be processed. Concerns were raised about this in estimates and we did have this long and not very convincing technical explanation of the process which basically said every process took 24 hours. Obviously the ACT government has not got past the era of batch processing. I invite it to move up to the 21st century. But I am glad to see that the government’s response to the estimates report is that they will start investigating BPAY processing times for payments with the intention of reducing delays. They certainly should.
Turning now to the Gungahlin shopfront, the estimates committee noted that no additional funds were allocated to the Gungahlin shopfront project in this year’s budget despite the allocation of $100,000 for a feasibility study in 2009-10. To date, $59,000 of this has been spent with no outcome and $41,000 has been surrendered in savings. I guess at least the $41,000 surrendered was a positive outcome.
The estimates committee recommended that the ACT government provide a timetable to the Legislative Assembly for the provision of government shopfront services for the Gungahlin region by December 2011. This was, as Mr Coe so rightly pointed out, part of the Labor-Greens parliamentary agreement to establish a government shopfront in Gungahlin by 2009 and to ensure that shopfront services in Civic are adequate to service community needs. It is very disappointing that the government has not done this. These are not hard; they could do it.
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