Page 920 - Week 03 - Thursday, 19 March 2015
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project compared to the number supporting it is increasing day by day, not only because of the flawed nature of this whole program but because of the arrogant attitude of Labor and the Greens towards it.
MR COE (Ginninderra) (11.29): We have heard some mixed messages from those opposite. We often talk about them being on the one page, but on this issue they seem to be slightly at odds. We have Minister Corbell telling me I am not doing anything and then we have Minister Rattenbury telling me I am doing too much. If Mr Corbell wants more—if he wants more FOIs, more QoNs, more questions without notice, more motions—we will happily oblige.
This is an important motion. If you do not have an Assembly committee to scrutinise the biggest capital works project ever, when do you have an Assembly committee? When do you initiate the highest standard of scrutiny that we as a chamber can initiate?
This project would have to be about the only project ever in the ACT of perhaps over $20 million, $30 million or $40 million where the government is not letterboxing. The government members are not actually telling Canberra what they are doing. I long for the day when Ms Porter letterboxes a piece about the capital metro project to Belconnen. I long for the day when Ms Berry puts down a piece about how good capital metro is for the good residents of Macgregor, Charnwood, Flynn, Dunlop, Scullin or Page—it goes on and on. I urge you to do that. I urge you to do that, because we have not seen it yet. Isn’t it amazing? There is a $783 million commitment and they do not even want to tell the good people of Canberra about it. I hope Ms Berry is going upstairs right now to frantically pen a piece of literature that they can pump out of the printer and have delivered to the good people of Belconnen.
Perhaps we will see Minister Gentleman—Mick Gentleman, Mr Gentleman—put something down and go door to door in Richardson, Chisholm, Gilmore, Macarthur and Lanyon, or down in Gordon or Bonython, and tell people just how good capital metro is going to be for them, just what they are getting in exchange for their higher rates. I long for that day when Minister Burch is there at the Calwell shops with an A-frame saying, “We’re bringing capital metro to Gungahlin.” That is what they did with the $11,000 tram. It was a very good exercise when they took it out to Kippax to show the good people at west Belconnen what they were not getting!
What about this master plan? Where is the tram going to go? I have a feeling that the tram is going to go everywhere. Perhaps we are going to have a spur line out to Kippax; we will have a spur line out to Charnwood; we will have a spur line up to Evatt shops—everywhere. We are going to have this extraordinary grid network. It is going to be absolutely superb. The reality is that only three per cent of Canberra’s population live within walking distance of the proposed tram site, three per cent of Canberra’s population—
Mr Corbell: Jobs—3½ thousand jobs.
MR COE: Minister Corbell interjects “3½ thousand jobs”. We all know that traditional construction develops far more jobs per dollar than does light rail, a point
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