Page 5133 - Week 12 - Thursday, 27 October 2011
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(a) suspend the capital works project until the Standing Committee has reported, the Government has responded and the Assembly has noted the Government’s response; and
(b) ensure that adequate temporary accommodation is provided to the Megalo Print Studio until permanent accommodation has been provided.”.
I will speak to that and to Mrs Dunne’s substantive motion. I have to say that I pretty much agree with everything that Mrs Dunne said. We have here a very unfortunate situation. We have here a situation where two groups of the arts community, unfortunately, have found themselves at loggerheads. We should never have ended up in that situation, and that is probably the worst part of this whole situation. Instead of the arts community all going in the same direction, we have internal conflict. That is very sad.
Looking a bit more at the history, I have to agree with Mrs Dunne that there has been no consultation on this. We in fact had a briefing on the subject with the department and I asked them: “When it was identified that there was significant music potential for the Fitters Workshop, what did you do? Did you go back and look at things?” And they basically said no. That is not how it should be. I do not know whether the acoustics are brilliant or not in the Fitters Workshop. That is not my area of expertise at all. I do know that people who should know have said that it is acoustically quite special. This is something that we actually need to come to grips with before we potentially destroy what may be one of the jewels in Canberra’s artistic crown, if you can describe us as having an artistic crown. I suppose if we did have a crown it would be artistic.
I think it has been really quite bizarre, looking at the last bits of public consultation which have been held on the Kingston Foreshore area. I attended the first part of the Purdon consultation and it was not even what you might talk about as the elephant in the room. The elephant was well and truly there. At least a third of the people at that consultation came because they wanted to see the Fitters Workshop used for music events.
The consultants had to say at the beginning: “Our brief is clear. The Fitters Workshop is not part of this consultation. It is a box which will be occupied by Megalo.” They very politely said, “We are just not interested in what you might have to say about this issue.” That is a real problem when we have public consultation and we tell the public we are not interested. I suppose, in the government’s defence, at least they did not do fake consultation. They were quite clear they were not interested.
The same thing has happened with the Conroy report. The Conroy report says, on page 10, that key factors of interest for the government included the fact that the Chief Minister had previously committed Megalo to being relocated in the Fitters Workshop and recognised there were issues to resolve.
As with Mrs Dunne, I have done the investigation as best I can into how this decision came to be made. I was told that what happened was that the LDA refurbished the Fitters Workshop. Because it was heritage listed they could not leave it in the state of
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