Page 5380 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 November 2011
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There are so many families in the ACT that face undue strain and pressures because they get caught in traffic jams on a daily basis. How many people are there in Canberra that would rather spend the 45 minutes or an hour it takes them to drive from Gungahlin to the city, or from Tuggeranong to the city, with their family rather than at the wheel? Canberrans are not using the roads because they like going for joyrides at peak hour. They are using their cars because they need to get somewhere. If you are driving to childcare, if you are driving to a school, if you are driving to the shops on the way to work, you are going to add to traffic congestion. What we want this government to do is to acknowledge that the lifestyles of people in the ACT mean that a dependency on cars is essential.
We should be trying to encourage people on to public transport. But we should not be trying to do so by stealth; that is, by making it harder to drive. We should be trying to get people on to public transport because ACTION offers a good service, because it offers a better service. We should not be doing so simply because it is comparatively the better option. There should not be a comparative advantage to using ACTION. It should be an actual advantage to using ACTION.
What this government has is a strategy to drive up the cost of parking, to make it harder to use your car in the ACT and to put more strain on families, thus to force people to use the grossly inefficient ACTION bus network.
What the Canberra Liberals stand for is ensuring that we have the best local government in Australia. We want to make sure that the services we offer are the ones that Canberrans need and the ones that Canberrans want. We are committed to ensuring that we are offering the services that Canberrans pay their taxes, year in, year out, for. I urge the Assembly to support the Canberra Liberals’ call to reinstate the T2 lane on Adelaide Avenue.
Debate interrupted in accordance with standing order 74 and the resumption of the debate made an order of the day for a later hour.
Sitting suspended from 12.26 to 2 pm.
RSPCA—funding
Statement by minister
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development, Minister for Territory and Municipal Services and Minister for Police and Emergency Services), by leave: Yesterday I was asked questions by Mr Coe and Mr Seselja about funding for the RSPCA. I have received further information in relation to this matter and I wish to make a brief statement.
In response to an article by the CEO of the RSPCA in the Canberra Times that suggested the government provided little if any government funding, I wrote to both the Canberra Times and the chair of the RSPCA to correct this information. The information I was provided indicated that an additional payment of $150,000 over and above their base funding of $420,000 had been made in the financial year 2010-11.
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