Page 1162 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 7 May 2014
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no qualms with the fact that the government that I am a part of actually seeks to address that full spectrum of issues—from the work that I know TAMS staff are out there doing on the ground every single day through to the larger scale policy issues of tackling climate change, playing our part in the Murray-Darling Basin and a range of other significant social, economic and environmental issues.
While I appreciate the scrutiny role that the opposition have rightly cast for themselves, what I do not appreciate is the constant disparaging of our city that we see coming from members on the opposition benches. Certainly, if you go to the text of Mr Hanson’s motion it is an extraordinarily long list of negatives. I think that Mr Hanson’s complaints about the disrepair of our city simply do not stack up to the reality of our town.
I have little doubt that Mr Hanson and his colleagues are out there doing their best to tell Canberrans how terrible things are. While I do not pretend that every last street corner in this town is spit polished, anyone who has travelled outside this fair city will know that Canberra is one of the cleanest, safest and easiest places to live in the world. We are a special city, a planned city, a bush capital and a city that has just celebrated our centenary. There will inevitably be some growing pains, but with vision and commitment I believe we can help steer Canberra into a prosperous and sustainable second century.
There are a whole range of areas that are raised in Mr Hanson’s motion and in the Chief Minister’s amendment. I would just like to speak to a few of them. When it comes to urban amenity and city services, the TAMS Directorate, for which I am responsible, plays a significant part in looking after the amenity and the feel of this city. TAMS city services are responsible for a range of core municipal and territory services, including city-wide cleaning and the management of our trees and green spaces. They have a whole range of work, whether it is looking after the skate parks across the city, the shopping centres, the playgrounds, the urban forest or mowing. All of these things are on the daily work list of those staff.
What I do know is that city services do a fantastic job delivering the kind of clean, green, liveable city that Canberrans are rightly proud of and love to live in. I also know that these staff have real pride in our city. I know, from talking to them, that they really want Canberra to be in as good a state as it can be. Now, does that mean there are not maintenance problems from time to time? Of course there are. We live in a sprawling city with a great level of infrastructure and things break; things get overgrown. That is why the government has put in place things like fix my street on Canberra Connect and mobile apps where people can report things from the very location the problem exists so that we can send staff out to fix them. As the letters I get regularly from my constituents underline, when problems get drawn to the government’s attention they get fixed, and that is as it should be.
Transport came up in a number of the discussions today, and I would like to spend a bit of time on that. Canberrans enjoy access to over 2,200 kilometres of footpaths as they walk around our beautiful city. In the last year TAMS maintained over 56,000 square metres of footpath, delivering what is, I think, on the whole, a high quality urban infrastructure for Canberra’s population.
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