Page 2428 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 13 August 2014
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Mr Barr: They are in Stirling, Jeremy.
MR HANSON: Are you bringing them back? There is a plan to bring everybody back in, if you read the strategy.
Mr Barr interjecting—
MADAM SPEAKER: Order, Mr Barr, you will have time to participate later.
MR HANSON: They want to bring in all the bureaucrats in finance, innovation and planning. What you have got is this ridiculous situation where the government say that they want to co-locate everybody but the element of this government that should be the one that is centralised—if you are going to centralise anything, it should be Shared Services—is spinning out to Gungahlin. So it is an incoherent strategy.
We can see that the government previously used to support spending money putting people in other locations. Andrew Barr said in the Canberra Times back in 2012:
It’s particularly important to locate staff in the Gungahlin town centre, it will add significantly to the local economy.
So the strategy back then was to put people where we could build resilience in local economies but now it is all about death star II. Why are we saying that we are not going to be considering other locations? If we are going to put it in Gungahlin, why have we not looked at other locations across this town to maintain a number of these public servants?
I will quote from Mr Seselja, when he spoke in the Assembly, just to show you how we are coming back to the future:
The point made by Mr Gilbert is valid. The ACT already has the highest office vacancy rate in Australia. As of July 2011 this vacancy rate was 13.3 per cent, up from 8.7 per cent in January 2010. Furthermore, in Civic, where the government office block is located, the vacancy rate as of July 2011 is at 14.2 per cent. The implication of adding another 50,000 to 60,000 square metres is obvious. The writing on the wall cannot be any clearer.
In fact, Ms Le Couteur, in her capacity as chair of the public accounts committee—
remember when we had a Green that used to think independently, back in the good old days when Ms Le Couteur would not just sell out but would actually do what she could to look at the facts of a case and present evidence—
... was reported as saying that the government has not looked at the reality of the property market. On that, Ms Le Couteur, you are 100 per cent correct. In fact, she was even reported to have said there were so many empty offices on the market that the owners would upgrade them to the highest government standards. The point I would like to make here is this building will worsen the office space glut in the ACT. In short, it is bad for ACT businesses.
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