Page 5001 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 26 October 2011

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The Assembly voted—

Question so resolved in the affirmative.

MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (12.09): I thank Mr Hargreaves for his interjection, “Another crushing by the coalition.” Yes, the coalition of the Greens and the Labor Party in this place has just crushed the will of the people of Calwell. The people of Calwell wanted something better out of this Assembly today and they have not got that. What they have got is not clear and what they have not got is certainty.

Yes, there is pressure to deliver aged care in this city but there is also pressure to get it right for the people of Calwell. In the main, it is due to past failures to plan adequately. The Calwell centre was planned before self-government. The placement of this property today is not the fault of this Assembly but it is the fault of this Assembly, particularly the Labor government in the time that they have been in office, that adequate planning was not made for the arrival of this day. And this day was always coming. And what will happen today is that we will not address past failures by planning adequately for a better future for the community of Calwell.

How will the Greens and the Labor Party address those past failures? They will address those past failures by further failure to adequately plan for the long term. What we are now about to pass is a motion that has a number of contradictions and those contradictions lead to nothing happening. The government is not committed to doing a master plan quickly. The government is not committed to holding off the sale of the land. The government, aided and abetted by the Greens, is failing the community of Calwell.

What we have is a watered down motion. The government gets its way. The Greens acquiesce as they always do, and the community loses. What this will do is compound the failures of the past into a burden on the future, and that is not a good outcome for the Calwell community and the people of southern Tuggeranong.

The Canberra Liberals will not vote for a mediocre outcome for our community. We listen to our community. We are out in our community and we want the best for our community. The community does not want platitudes, it does not want motherhood statements, and it does not want the contradictions that Ms Bresnan’s amendment has put into this motion.

The motion as it will now read has a number of the things that the community have said to many of us, and that is fine. But let us go to paragraph (1) as amended where Ms Bresnan points out:

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