Page 38 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 10 February 2015
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machines and the debacle that is the Tharwa Drive closures. Who is responsible for both? The same minister. Yes, here we go again. You have failed to accept your faults, you have failed to improve your performance, you have failed to learn from your mistakes, you have failed to deliver better governance for the people of the ACT and you have failed to change your ways. On that you should go. That is Westminster. You must take responsibility.
Instead, apparently it is a nameless tradesman who goes from disaster to disaster, spiking the guns of the minister, causing mayhem in the government. That poor nameless tradesman is incredibly busy following Joy Burch from disaster to disaster so that she has an alibi.
What it does not say is that all of these are the result of errors of judgement—poor judgement by a minister who is not up to the job. People are saying, “Do better.” People would like to see you do better. But we do not see that happening.
It is interesting. Somebody writes a letter the day after the debacle ends. It is my fault that constituents have written to me while this is going on, asking what the minister is going to do about it. You are going to get another letter. I got another one on the weekend. People are still writing, because they are incensed at the way you behave, at your lack of regard and decency over answering people’s questions and at the fact that it is always somebody else’s fault.
Many letters have arrived with various members of the opposition. They have all gone to the government as well. What we do not get is a minister who improves her performance. We stumble from error to error, from bad call to bad call. It is the taxpayers that pay. So bad was the mistake over the poker machines that the Chief Minister had to step in, claiming he knew nothing about it. We will get to that later. Apparently he did not know anything about it. Mr Corbell did; Ms Burch did; everybody but the Chief Minister seemed to know that this was about to happen. Either he is not in control of his ministers or we have not got the full story. He had to publicly humiliate a minister and say, “This does not happen.”
It is constituents who are calling for the minister to go. It is people who are upset about their loved ones who were put at risk or whose children did not get to the airport on time and lost the value of their tickets. At the Tuggeranong Community Council meeting, one person got up and said he left 40 minutes early to get to a dialysis appointment for his wife, and they got there an hour and five minutes late. He then related the case that, thankfully after the road closure had finished, his wife had an incident that required emergency services attendance. He said, “What would have happened if it had happened during the debacle?” I have one email here that says that people saw ambulances stuck in the traffic jam. Apparently there was an emergency services management plan, but here we have ambulances stuck in the traffic jam. What sort of minister for emergency services allows that to happen?
Then we get to the Tuggeranong Community Council. A former Labor candidate, Karl Maftoum, stands up and moves a motion of censure against the president of the Tuggeranong Community Council for not doing his job in informing the community that the government was about to screw up. It is the Tuggeranong Community
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