Page 2612 - Week 08 - Thursday, 14 August 2014
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The government is implementing its election commitments and parliamentary agreement commitments to provide $416,000 over four years to the Canberra office of the Aboriginal Legal Service. This will facilitate the Aboriginal Legal Service providing additional duty solicitor capability in the Magistrates Court. That is a very important reform. The government is providing $200,000 in additional funding for the Legal Aid Commission to help it meet the cost of expensive legal matters.
There is also significant investment occurring in the area of the Office of Regulatory Services—in particular, more capacity to deal with complaints about illegal parking. We have seen a significant increase in the number of complaints from residents about illegal parking in Canberra, particularly parking on verges, parking on nature strips and so on. It is a real bugbear for many people, and I receive many complaints about it. As a result the government has put more funding in place to employ additional parking inspectors so that we can respond to these complaints. We will also upgrade existing single-bay parking meters with new solar-powered kerbside parking meters to modernise that infrastructure and improve service delivery to the community.
I will close by mentioning the significant investments we are making in the area of emergency services—$50.7 million in new funding for the ESA in this year’s budget. That is a mixture of both capital and recurrent expenditure. That includes $20 million for the new ambulance and fire station at Aranda. This is the third large-scale build of new emergency services facilities being delivered by this government—a really significant investment. This government has implemented its election commitments to build new Fire & Rescue and ambulance stations at west Belconnen and at Aranda, and a new Fire & Rescue station at south Tuggeranong.
This Labor government has a strong record of investing in better facilities, better infrastructure and better equipment and vehicles to meet the important needs of our emergency services. I do not believe that any other emergency services minister can boast of such a record—improved and new ESA headquarters capability, a new training centre for all of our emergency services, including for the first time a dedicated hot fire training capability right here in Canberra. Previously our Fire & Rescue personnel had to travel to Sydney to undertake such critical training. It is something that was never addressed by previous governments.
This government has invested in, for the first time, a dedicated helicopter operations facility for rural firefighting operations. For the first time we have a dedicated facility that provides for that very important and critical rapid attack capability for remote area firefighting through those helicopter operations. That is another very important piece of infrastructure.
Then, of course, there are the new stations themselves—west Belconnen, south Tuggeranong and Aranda. The government has made the investments in new infrastructure. We have upgraded a whole range of equipment. Apart from the communications and other critical data transfer technologies that the ESA now has, we have invested, for example, in new equipment for our Fire & Rescue service, state-of-the-art road rescue equipment, to meet the needs and face the challenges of the new materials used in modern vehicles.
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