Page 1462 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 28 March 2012
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Services Directorate eventually said: “Yes, you do have a problem. Yes, this is an issue. We will go back to taws and look at this.” I do not know whether the minister is completely on board, but this was the intelligence that was relayed to me late last week. And if the minister chooses to have any further intelligence on that, we would welcome it.
This is the point that I made to Ms Hunter. I understand the position that Ms Hunter is in. Ms Hunter sees, as we all do, that there are critical shortages of childcare places, particularly for the under-twos. They are across Canberra. There are shortages in Weston Creek, as Mr Hanson has paid testament to. It is not acceptable, as Ms Hunter has described, for people to have children in more than one childcare centre where they have to juggle between centres on different days. It is bad for the families and it is particularly bad for the children involved, because it makes it harder for them to settle, to feel comfortable and to get the quality care that everyone says is so important.
But having regard to the fact that the planning for this has already been held up by the department and they have now said that they need to go back to taws and address the issue of parking and the battleaxe block, this is the opportunity for us to get it right for the whole community so that the community of the ACT is not paying $7½ million for a gold-plated childcare centre.
When I have talked to people in the sector, both in the community sector and in the private sector, I have not yet found anyone who can say to me, hand on heart, that $7½ million for a 125-place childcare centre is good value for money. No-one who works in the sector, who knows what is going on in the sector, believes that this is good value for money for the ACT taxpayer. There is not anyone who thinks that we should not perhaps build on that site a childcare centre. Everyone encourages and welcomes the site, but they have grave reservations about $7½ million plus another $463,000 a year in recurrent costs—for goodness knows what. Some of that is depreciation but I have not yet had a reasonable explanation of what the remainder of that is. This is an extraordinary amount of money for this minister to mismanage.
What we are actually seeing is that the government have really flustered around. In April last year they put out with great fanfare their plan to build this childcare centre. We are nine months—more—into the financial year when they were supposed to spend most of this money, and they are not in a position to turn a sod. As of Thursday or Friday last week, they had agreed that they really need to go back to taws on the planning on the site—not so much the planning for the childcare centre but the planning for how you interact between the two blocks of land.
These are significant planning issues which have been attempted to be brushed under the carpet by the minister’s directorate and have only come to light when Communities@Work have gone to the highest echelons in the department. There is now an admission that there is a problem. Communities@Work have been begging CSD to solve this problem for months. They have been very patient and tolerant with this minister, but they have run out of patience.
Quite frankly, Madam Deputy Speaker, organisations like Communities@Work should not be treated in the way they have been treated by this minister over this issue.
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