Page 5468 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 November 2011
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one it was marked to. At the time of sending the application, Mr Tim Dalton, who is the convener of the subcommittee for the Weston Creek Community Council, spoke to the festival officer and laboured on the fact that he and others would be more than happy to answer any questions that the ACT festival fund cared to ask.
Last year was the first time since 2004 that Weston Creek did not have a festival. Communities@Work, unable to continue their role as event managers, looked for a community body to hand over the task to. Since the horrific 2003 bushfires, Communities@Work had managed the festival in cooperation with local Weston Creek community groups.
Having secured the services of the past festival manager, along with strong letters of support from Communities@Work, the Weston Creek Community Association, the Weston Creek Rotary Club, the Cooleman Court shopping centre and several Molonglo MLAs—I believe including Ms Le Couteur—the Weston Creek Community Council had been confident of some seed money to make this event happen.
The Weston Creek festival is an annual community event held each year in spring. It has had several sites, including the parkland behind Cooleman Court and Weston oval. It has been run in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s as well as in this decade. The main theme throughout the decades has been one of celebrating our district’s community spirit with entertainment, stalls, rides, events and activities for all ages.
An innovative change to the festival proposed for this year, for autumn 2012, was that it be held in autumn rather than spring when many other events are competing for talent, time and resources. The venue that was proposed was Fetherston Gardens, Weston Creek’s newly named community park and arboretum which, for those who are unaware, are the former grounds for the School of Horticulture in Weston.
The Weston Creek Community Council sought an amount of $20,000 to support the festival but, sadly, they got nothing. No doubt they would have been grateful for a lesser amount, but they got nothing. What is galling to members of the community council and the Weston Creek community is that, while absolutely no money has been provided to support a community festival, the community has had a monolithic piece of roadside art imposed upon it. The community did not ask for it. The community council did not ask for it. They were not consulted. It was an imposition.
The government ignored the request from the community council for funding to support a community festival. It considers that it is not worth a single cent but sees fit to spend tens of thousands—I would be interested to know what the total amount is; I have heard rumors that it is as much as a quarter of a million, and I do not know if that is true—on a piece of roadside art. If ever you needed an example of how out of touch this government is—the contrast between the community’s priorities and this government’s priorities—it is that the government has deemed fit to lavish an expensive artwork on the community that it did not want, whilst rejecting the request for community funding for the festival.
I will quote from the Chronicle today:
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