Page 285 - Week 01 - Thursday, 27 February 2014
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considered and answered; and I want the Canberra public to be part of the project as much as possible. In fact, I think the highest level of openness and public involvement is essential to the success of the project.
Look at other successful transport and development projects from other jurisdictions. They do well when the public is heavily involved in them and, in essence, the project is owned by the public. I have mentioned before that when I visited Portland last year I noted that the local government there had enshrined several planning principles which govern its projects. Number one is public involvement. That is a lesson for Canberra and we need to genuinely engage and involve the community in projects and leverage community knowledge and creativity.
I also say to Mr Coe and the Liberal Party that I understand how difficult it can be sometimes as a non-executive member to get all the information you may want about a government project. I think more and more information about the light rail project is becoming available, and this information will continue to grow. This is the expected trajectory, because the project has been going through the initial planning stages. There is naturally a lot of planning work occurring and possibly not as many concrete outcomes to show just yet. The project is starting to enter a new phase with the appointment of the capital metro director and the communications director, for example. The capital metro website has been established, and I believe the communications with the public will be improved in coming months.
This is part of the reason I am satisfied with Mr Corbell’s amendment, which I will be supporting. The capital metro project will naturally change and go through different phases. The information that is available at different stages will vary. It is a bit pre-emptive to lock in two days of additional committee hearings every year until the end of the Assembly term. Mr Corbell’s proposal I think is actually very sensible. It extends the time available to question capital metro through both annual reports and estimates committees. It also adds an extra half-day special committee hearing where capital metro and relevant ministers can be questioned. That is for 2014 only at this point. If we find that is not satisfactory then by all means let us reconsider it, but it is important not to overdo it at this stage. I think we should see how it goes during 2014.
The capital metro office will, of course, be extremely busy. It has a very large project to deliver and it has timelines to meet on behalf of the community. The last thing I would want to do is consume their time with extra days of hearings that are not really needed and essentially turn out to be filling in time. Every now and then we see this occur when a committee has an agency before it but does not necessarily have enough questions to fill the time. That has happened on a range of occasions that I can recall.
I simply underline that I understand Mr Coe’s request for further opportunities for questioning and information gathering but, having thought through it and thought about the practicalities, I think we should start with Mr Corbell’s proposal which I think is a satisfactory outcome to allow the level of scrutiny needed for this project.
There is another dimension to this issue that is important to mention. To be perfectly frank, once this additional committee time is set up, the challenge for the Liberal Party and Mr Coe is to use these additional opportunities properly. It does not serve
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