Page 2142 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 8 May 2012
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We do not want to continue the situation where there is a constant clamouring for repairs to the road. We are not as aloof as the ACT government is when they fail in their core business. We see that the minister is failing in her core business by the disdainful way she addressed this issue this afternoon. What we see from the Gallagher-Hunter government is a government that is incapable of understanding how travel appears to work.
When you have a distributor road getting busier, you need to increase the safety standards. This is not only plain common sense; it is fundamental to effective urban planning. We pride ourselves on having a well designed and liveable city. Yet the government’s incapacity to foresee that the roads will get busier as our population increases and that public transport usage stagnates is fascinating.
I think that the issue of Spofforth Street, which I note was raised by constituents with the Chief Minister on Chief Minister talkback the other day, is a standard case in point. My constituents in Holt now avoid Spofforth Street because there is such a plethora of traffic calming measures that it becomes impossible to negotiate.
Part of this blame has to be laid at the feet of Meredith Hunter and her eco-warriors. How else could you explain the absolute neglect of Canberra’s roads that we have seen in the past four years except for the fact that the ACT government is beholden to the environmental pie-in-the-sky ideals of the Greens? Ms Bresnan has touched upon this today.
It should not be a dichotomy about the Greens being for public transport and the Liberals for roads. There has to be a middle ground. But how else does a desperate mother get her sick child to hospital? She does it in a car. How else do we get our goods carried? It does not happen by public transport, Madam Deputy Speaker. How else does the double bassist get to their recital? They do it in a car. And how else do elderly people who are being cared for by others get to do their weekly shop except by car?
How are any of these things meant to happen without proper roads and road management systems? While the Greens speak in hushed tones of shoving more people on to public transport that a decreasing number of people want to use in its current form, they forget that our roads remain an essential part of a successful city. Let us not forget the hypocrisy of their position. They want more people to grab their MyWay cards, go to the closest bus stop and wait for hours for a bus that may or may not come and then spend their time on the bus on badly designed and badly maintained roads clogged by traffic.
In my own electorate there are problematic areas that time after time my office and the office of my colleague Mr Coe spend time dealing with. We inform them that the community has a particular problem with a particular bit of road and our calls for a solution usually fall on deaf ears. We see streets such as Tillyard Drive in Charnwood that has hazardous speeding cars. We see the hideous failure, as I have already mentioned, of Spofforth Street in Holt that has been laced with speed chicanes which obviously has resulted in all of the surrounding streets becoming clogged as they have not been given speed chicanes.
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