Page 91 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 10 February 2015
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the replacement services are rostered open at desks around the city and there is a pamphlet service only. It is not the same as the service that was offered before. This was a confusing cash grab for $80,000 savings in rent. While I understand the intent, ultimately explained, of putting services further out into the community, the manner in which it was done left a lot to be desired.
The women’s day awards in 2012-13 were another example where the minister needed to follow due process. The advertisement for nominees was forgotten. Again, the minister showed that perhaps she was expected to be on top of too many things to manage all of these priorities.
Minister Burch has had carriage of one of the biggest events in the Canberra calendar, the Multicultural Festival, including the Fringe Festival. While much of the Multicultural Festival has been really great, we acknowledge the debacle of the appointment of the Fringe Festival director last year, appointing a director without due process. There was no competitive process—just a job handed to a particular person. As a minister, she unknowingly signed off on a burlesque Nazi strip show on an open stage only metres from the Polish, German and Jewish cultural stalls, many people from which contacted me and were outraged at the explicit nature of the show and the content. Parents and other general public members expressed concern to me at what had happened.
It is clear that Minister Burch is being expected to do too much as a minister, and it is time that those opposite were reasonable in their expectation and gave her a fair go.
MR HANSON (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (4.56), in reply: I thank everybody for their contributions. Obviously I am disappointed that this motion will not get up. I fear that, as was the case last year, the Assembly’s failure to act today will result in our revisiting this issue, which is neither good for the community nor, ultimately, good for the government, and I would also say it is not good for Ms Burch.
Turning specifically to some of the comments, Ms Burch made a deliberate attempt to conflate the issue of the moral bankruptcy of the Labor Party owning Labor clubs, owning pokies, taking money from people on the pokies to fund their elections and regulating the pokies. I have called that morally bankrupt. The former Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope, has said that is a moral problem.
That is a very different issue from the issue of clubs more generally. I make it very clear, as Ms Burch knows, because when she was reading from a quote she changed the quote to say “a club” rather than “the Labor Club”. That was a disingenuous thing for her to do. We on this side support the clubs. I am not anti-pokie. In fact, I would be far less anti-pokie than Mr Barr. That is not the issue. The issue is that of club ownership. I can quote from a couple of articles that make that point. In the CityNews:
The critical political issue was not so much that they had not really considered the right and wrong in the ramifications of increasing harm associated with gambling but the failure to recognise the level of political sensitivity. Both ministers—
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