Page 19 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 25 February 2014
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the opposite. I am happy to name some of those organisations. All of the peak education groups, for example, speak very highly of the minister and her performance in that portfolio. The same goes for many of the community groups and the disability section. They again speak very highly of the relationships she has created in those areas.
When I reflect on the last three months that the government has been working away with the Assembly in adjournment, I look at some of the projects Minister Burch as been working on, including implementing the national disability insurance scheme, the single biggest change that is being implemented across the community sector. That is a massive change and Minister Burch leads that work for the government, and we are leading it for the country. In fact, we are the first jurisdiction that will be all in the scheme in the next couple of years, and many other jurisdictions are looking to the leadership that Minister Burch is showing in that portfolio from a whole-of-population point of view. Mr Hanson may scoff, but that is actually the case.
As to implementing the agreement we have with the commonwealth over the national schools reform agreement, including the needs-based funding application both for the government and non-government sectors, again, Minister Burch is leading that work for the government. Another project is running the most successful Multicultural Festival this city has ever seen with more than 250,000 people attending a weekend’s festivities in Civic and, dare I say, running probably the most successful Fringe Festival the community has ever seen.
I think there is probably a clear line down the centre of this place when it comes to those who attended the Fringe Festival—a Liberal-free zone could have been another name for it. I do not consider myself a fringe dweller, but I attended the Fringe Festival and some of what I saw was confronting and in your face and not what I would see on a day-to-day basis. But I also acknowledge that that is part of the work of a Fringe Festival—to challenge, to entertain and to have freedom for artists to perform in such a way. From what I could see that night, it was incredibly popular.
Not one complaint about the burlesque performance was made to me until a couple of MLAs who did not attend started running this as a media issue for a particular purpose and probably got the result they wanted—having a bit of a culture war starting, promoting that behind the scenes and managing to take some of the positive outlook of the Multicultural Festival and trash what had happened that weekend. It is not working. Yes, some people did not enjoy that performance, but is that a reason to sack a minister, curtail artistic freedom in the city and have ministerial intervention in artistic performance, whether it be the fringe or the Multicultural Festival or, dare I say, community festivals, about what is and what is not appropriate for the community to see? That is not something this government supports. It is not something we have ever supported and it is not something we will support in the future. In terms of the fringe as an issue relating to Ms Burch’s competence as a minister, I simply do not accept it.
The Liberal Party are wrong. I have to say that the opinion piece was the best Sunday Canberra Times article I have read in perhaps 10 years—it took me a lot longer to read the Sunday Canberra Times last Sunday. I do not think politicians in this place should get into the habit of exercising their moral judgement around what constitutes
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