Page 3580 - Week 08 - Friday, 24 August 2012
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created by 11 years of the Labor government. And these have not been improved by the current minister. There is a litany of failures. While Minister Burch might just see them as administrative failures and policy hiccups along the way, Canberra citizens are concerned and broken by these failures. They are anything but hiccups.
We are talking about a generation of children in care who have been emotionally, mentally and, in the worst cases, physically damaged. We are talking about the “little buggers” that Minister Burch referred to at Bimberi who were damaged by maladministration. We are talking about the staff at Bimberi who were assaulted while they worked. Even as recently as yesterday, Minister Burch could not give this chamber an assurance that staff at Bimberi were not required to work alone and put their lives in danger, put their bodies in danger, as has been the case before. We are talking about the livelihoods and welfare of Canberra’s families, who are damaged by rising childcare costs. And this has gone unaddressed by Minister Burch.
Then there is the arts community, which has been damaged by the division that we have seen in relation to some of this government’s more spectacular policy failures and this minister’s persistence in perpetuating that damage. This minister has had every opportunity to recoil from the bad decision making that was made in relation to the Fitters Workshop and put that plan on a better footing, but she has failed to do so.
In relation to childcare in particular, we have seen substantial failures. We have to remember the election policy that was promulgated about this time four years ago, when the Labor Party said that they would build two childcare centres—they would spend $4 million and they would build two childcare centres, one in the north and one in the south.
Since then, we have seen the government refurbish half of the Flynn primary school for a childcare centre, which created about 10 new places. When it refurbished the Flynn primary school, it refurbished it to re-house two existing childcare centres, so that was not a new childcare centre; it was new premises for two old childcare centres.
Since then we have seen the government commit to spending $7½ million on a childcare centre in Holder, which will also have recurrent costs in excess of $600,000. I have questioned the wisdom of the government’s building this childcare centre, this apparently gold-plated childcare centre, at something like twice the cost that the private sector could build it for. Not only has the ACT forgone the revenue from selling the block of land for the Holder childcare site, which could be in the order of $1 million, but the ACT taxpayer is now committed to spending $7½ million on a childcare centre that the private sector could build for probably half the cost. And the ACT taxpayer will be committed to the ongoing recurrent costs of $600,000 a year to run and maintain that childcare centre. The Canberra Liberals would have done that differently.
In short, Ms Burch has done very little for the people of the ACT that is good, and she has caused a lot of harm along the way. In this year’s budget, we have seen that there is $15.36 million of new money, some of it only over three years, with no allocation in the fourth year of the budget for increased out of home care costs. What are the strategies and how are we going to account for the money that will underpin this
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