Page 1082 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 20 March 2013
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I must say, and I will get to the motion at hand, just responding to comments from the Leader of the Opposition, he might need to seek some treatment for his unhealthy preoccupation with the Labor left. He might need some medical help. It sounds like you are missing something in your life, Mr Hanson. You are missing that camaraderie—I do not know—but maybe you are drawn in a strange way to the socialist beliefs. I do not know. Perhaps, Mr Hanson, it is the fact that the Liberal Party at the moment is a little unfriendly. Perhaps those meetings are not as collegiate as they should be. Maybe there are too many people in the room.
Mr Hanson interjecting—
MADAM ACTING SPEAKER: Mr Hanson, Ms Gallagher has the floor.
MS GALLAGHER: You wanted a small meeting, and it is going to be cramped. No-one is going to be able to fit in. But I would suggest perhaps some attention will be needed to be applied to what I would see as a very unhealthy preoccupation. I have no interest in Liberal Party meetings.
Mr Hanson: Really? I’m not sure that is quite true.
MS GALLAGHER: If they are going to be in the paper, then, sure, I will read it, but I do not sit here um-ing and ah-ing about what happens here and who is saying what at a Liberal Party meeting.
I thank Dr Bourke for bringing this motion to the Assembly today. The government are very proud of the city we live in and, as I said last week and a number of times, we are very proud of the role we play as the national capital and a place we all call home. We relish the fact that Canberra encourages free-thinking and innovation and stimulates and nurtures our national pride. We relish the fact that our community is close, connected, well educated, politically involved and caring.
We celebrate the fact that our city leads and does not follow, that we punch above our weight in human rights, education and research and delivering new and innovative services such as the ground-breaking nurse-led walk-in-centre. We tackle climate change. We care for our environment. We make sure our children are well educated and we invest for the future, for our ageing population and indeed to ensure that we have a high-quality healthcare system.
When it comes to governing, Labor has never been afraid to lead, to tackle some of the hard issues, to break through and create real and substantial change for the community. We understand that leadership requires vision, having foresight and facing squarely up to hard choices. We understand that in order to lead our community we must make decisions to prioritise and focus our efforts to ensure we create the foundations for a just, prosperous and sustainable city of the future. This can only be done by having vision and the courage to shape our city by investing in transformational projects, creating essential infrastructure that is needed and creating community pride and spirit to support the changes and challenges which we will inevitably face when planning for the long term.
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