Page 1098 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 20 March 2013
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directorate are very passionate about this city. They work very hard to deliver the services they can within the resources that are available. I know that so many of the staff across TAMS take a real pride in this city and are out there doing their best every day to ensure that it looks as good as it can and that it is a pleasant place to live.
Frankly, I think anybody who has travelled anywhere else in the world will have a great appreciation of just what a great lifestyle we have here in Canberra and the level of amenity that this city has. Of course, there are always things that are open for improvement. I think that with the age of our city and the age of the investment in a lot of the infrastructure, we are reaching a point where a lot of it does need reinvestment as things begin to age. That will be a challenge for us over the coming years. Certainly the delivery of those good municipal services is something that I am very focused on.
We are being very responsive to community requests as well. We do get a vast number. We are not able to meet all of them perhaps in the time frame that people would hope for, but I can assure the community that the directorate is working very hard to get to the issues that they are raising with us. We certainly get a lot of positive feedback through Canberra Connect about the service that people receive when they call that government number.
With respect to some of the other areas in Dr Bourke’s motion, we have had considerable discussion about tax reform. I think this comes back to some of the discussion we were having yesterday around infrastructure, and there is the reference in Dr Bourke’s motion to leadership. It does take leadership to do tax reform. It is important that we do not just take the simple, short-term option of running an easy slogan election campaign, but that we actually get on with some of these policies that academics and experts have been identifying to government for years and saying that these sort of reforms need to be made. It is a credit to the Treasurer that he moved forward with this in the last term. That is why the Greens are willing to support it—because it is the sort of long-term tax reform that Australia needs generally. Certainly I think it is a good thing that the territory is moving forward to do this, to set ourselves up with a sustainable revenue base for an extended period of time and move away from the sort of taxes that have been described by things like the Henry tax review as inefficient and unfair.
When it comes to transport for Canberra, referred to in paragraph (g), members will know this is an area I am particularly passionate about, and we will no doubt talk about it many times in this chamber in the coming years. I have already touched on the implementation of the light rail project. That is the sort of thing that this city really needs and it will make a real difference for the people of Gungahlin in terms of beginning to alleviate the problems of congestion that I spoke of earlier and that we are starting to see.
Paragraph (h) refers to climate change and energy issues. Again, I spoke about this in the discussion on infrastructure yesterday. By moving the ACT towards a greater supply of electricity coming from renewable energy it will really set up our energy security future, particularly from a pricing point of view. With the way that prices for solar energy are coming down and the fact that there are no ongoing costs—once the
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