Page 201 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 November 2012
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improves people’s lives. It is the sort of policy that ensures we do not wait until the last minute to get the road upgrades that we need and to get the infrastructure upgrades that we need.
I do commend Mr Coe for bringing this motion forward. Mr Coe, of course, has been a great advocate for better local services, a great advocate for the people of Ginninderra. He has served very well in that and he is doing a great job as a shadow minister. So I commend him for his work, for his commitment to local services and for this motion today.
MR COE (Ginninderra) (4.22), in reply: Mr Rattenbury said earlier that it was lucky that he was the minister responsible for roads and that his views conveniently tied in with those of the Labor Party. Some may call it lucky; others may say it is because they come from the same ideological perspective, and that perspective is, as I said earlier, a perspective whereby they want people to feel guilty about driving their cars. They want people to not enjoy a high quality of life. They want people to pay more, to surrender more to the state. They want, in effect, more central control, and with Mr Rattenbury as the minister for roads, in amongst the Territory and Municipal Services portfolio, that is exactly what that ideology is going to get.
At the start he said it was a vague motion and then later on said he would address the specifics of it. It just goes to show how erratic this minister is and how inconsistent his decisions are going to be over the coming years—or however long the sham coalition lasts.
It is quite specific what we are proposing in paragraph (1) of the motion—so specific that he in fact addressed each of the specific points in his speech and then went on to say that we did not cost it. Yet for each of them he said the government was working on it. So it seems to me that we have yet another politically motivated speech from Mr Rattenbury, the same sort of speech we got from any Labor member or any Greens member in the previous Assembly, which goes to show that there is no substance; it is all about party politics, and in actual fact the alliance we have today is as close as it could possibly get.
Mr Gentleman chimed into the debate by saying that parking is really not an issue in the ACT and that anybody in Canberra who thinks that parking is an issue is wrong. He went on to say how many spots are vacant. Well, tell that to anybody who drives to Barton each day for work. Tell anybody who has a meeting in Barton during the day that parking is plentiful in and around the parliamentary triangle. Try going to Cooleman Court on a Saturday or Sunday morning. Try going to Jamison on a Saturday or Sunday morning. Try going to Gungahlin on a Saturday morning. It goes on and on.
The fact is that the provision of parking spaces, like the other services that are mentioned in this motion, are core services for a local government, and if this government, including the new Greens member, did not get sidetracked with issues of little or no consequence for the vast majority of Canberrans but got on with the core business of running our city we might actually have some solutions to the problems which are posed to members of this place on a daily basis through telephone calls, through emails, solicited by doorknocking or at shopping centres.
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