Page 1457 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 March 2012
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Investing in young Canberrans’ development is good public investment. Further, ensuring that the childcare operators who are going to be running the centre are not-for-profit organisations, we believe, is a good thing. These organisations deliver better-quality outcomes for the children who attend their centres. Of course, we also have many great providers in the private sector across town as well. I also congratulate them on the delivery that they do every day. But the not-for-profits, as I said, do make up 80 per cent of our market.
We do not believe that the government should be reconsidering the current decision to develop the centre. I do not know whether this should or could be characterised as a principle debate about government-owned assets, but for the record I will say that the Greens do support the public ownership of assets. We believe that it is in the long-term community’s interest to do it.
We also believe that there is no issue at the end of the day about government developing these sorts of assets and owning these sorts of assets. We may be talking about a clear and philosophical position that parties are taking up here this afternoon. But there are examples where the government has been able to build, deliver and own, and that has all gone very well.
Another example of that would be the community hubs around the ACT. These are former school sites that have been redeveloped and refurbished. They continue to be owned by government and have been highly successful. They have been very much appreciated by the many, many community organisations who have moved in and been able to access quality and affordable accommodation.
I have visited many of those hubs. I know from those organisations that they are incredibly appreciative of having quality space to either run their offices or to deliver programs and services. These are very diverse types of organisations as well. A while ago I attended the opening of the SIDS office. I have also been to the opening of the Warehouse Circus that opened up in one of these hubs as well. All of them are appreciative. The government have been able to deliver on those former school sites. I really do not see why they cannot build and deliver on a childcare centre in this case.
As I said, the Greens will be opposing the motion today because we cannot support a motion that asks the government to look at changing a decision that provides for a community organisation to run the centre and for the childcare to be delivered in a timely way. This is a really critical issue. Mrs Dunne has raised some issues around car parking and whether this has really taken the whole project back to the drawing board. There seems to be disagreement about whether that is the case.
My information is that the DA is out and we will know a decision by next week about where that is up to. Ms Burch has said that there was one issue that was raised. That does not seem to be indicating that there is a major problem there. We will see after next Tuesday whether it is the case but still we believe that we are a long way down the line on this project and we do need to make sure that we are meeting the needs of so many Canberra families.
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