Page 3432 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 17 August 2011
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There is no real parking plan and that is why Mr Coe rightly calls for the updating and finalisation of the ACT parking strategy. I do not think that if every car in the ACT fleet were electric the Greens would be happy. It does beg the question. I think there will be a transition to alternatives to petrol internal combustion engine-powered cars.
I think the electric car will take off. Perhaps Henry Ford did get it wrong in 1912 when he chose petrol over battery and the clock will come round as it so often does. But I would suspect that even if the entire fleet was electric, the Greens would still be unhappy with the notion. There is the fundamental difference in the philosophy.
I want a community that is engaged. I want a community that is not isolated. It is very easy to live in the inner north and to say that everybody should get out of their cars. But you go and tell that to people in Amaroo and go and tell that to the people in Banks. You go and tell that to the people who have one car or two cars because of the nature of their jobs. Often young families starting out have a second job. It might be at night. It will be at various locations or there will be two, three, four jobs. To do that properly, they need a car. They deserve for us to make their lives when they are starting out much easier than some of the suggestions in these two sets of amendments would make it for them.
I think we need to be considerate of the very nature of this city that is as wide and as long as Sydney and has probably got one-twentieth of the population. In that regard, the viability of public transport is a long-term goal because—(Time expired.)
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (6.03): It is interesting to listen to the Greens with their attempt to justify the unjustifiable. Ms Bresnan in particular spent a whole lot of time saying how the Greens were not opposed to parking and were not opposed to cars and then went on to speak at length about the importance of public transport. No-one in this place disputes the importance of public transport. However, there is nothing in Mr Coe’s motion about public transport. It does not diss public transport; it is silent on the subject of public transport, because Mr Coe’s motion is about parking. It is unashamedly about parking. Parking is a very important issue for people in the ACT.
If you work in the Woden Valley, in particular in the Woden town centre, it is an extraordinarily difficult problem. People get to work in Woden at 7.30 in the morning because, if you do not get there before then, you have to park miles away and walk long distances to get into the office. Of course, most of those people are public servants who are ground down by the Rudd and now the Gillard government and they work long hours. Even though they get to work at 7.30 in the morning they are still there quite late at night as well, so the commonwealth government is getting fairly good value out of it. But the reason they are there so early in the morning is because that is what they have to do to get a place to park near work.
For instance, there is a new health building in Woden. There were some parking spaces available under that, but they had to be auctioned off. There was a ballot for staff because there is such demand for parking. These are people who are not indulgent people who just drive to work for the sake of it. These are, for the most part, people who drive to work because there is no other convenient and accessible way to get to work.
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