Page 4309 - Week 13 - Thursday, 19 November 2015
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To the Clerk of the Legislative Assembly and all the staff of the Legislative Assembly, thank you very much for your work this year. I feel that I have to single out, as I did today, Celeste Italiano and Ian Duckworth for the extraordinary work that they are doing in relation to the building project that we have.
As always, I have to pay tribute to Lyle and my family, who are the backbone and the support for all that I do. I have been celebrating—it is no secret—that our youngest son has just finished school. There have been 65 cumulative years of schooling starting in 1987. We are still doing a little happy dance because today is the day we pay our last school fees ever. We are not going to be empty nesters; it seems that half the family is coming home again, for a variety of reasons, and we will be a household bursting at the seams for a while. We will be happily welcoming home members of our family who have lived interstate and are coming back to Canberra, as they do, especially when they have children and they suddenly discover that childminding is a lot more convenient when there are grandparents around.
Because it is so early, I have not really got around to Christmas shopping, but I have started to plan Christmas shopping. I was thinking about what gifts I could give to members of the ACT Legislative Assembly and how I could keep it on the theme of my adjournment debate speeches, which have been common, especially in the latter part of this year. As every sitting week I have been trying to bring forward some of the views of constituents about light rail, I thought that I would give everyone a T-shirt emblazoned with a motto about light rail.
I will start with the Chief Minister. He will know, as we all do, that Jon of Bruce has views on the subject. He said in the Canberra Times recently that the business cases that he saw “didn’t encourage investment”.
To the Leader of the Opposition, it is pretty simple. His motto comes from Cheryl of Florey, and it is simple: “No, no, no, no!”
Mr Rattenbury, who is the Minister for Territory and Municipal Services, the minister responsible for ACTION and the Greens member who makes up the numbers for the Labor Party, it is not so much a slogan as a small epistle from Dirk of Page: “My concern is the ability of a single person, belonging to a party that is claiming to be democratic and community concerned, to impose its will on a whole city, without reference to the people. I am talking about the exorbitant commitment to spend about one billion dollars on a so called light rail system, which is only of benefit to a small part of the population. This is particularly difficult to swallow because our ACTION bus services are substandard.”
Mr Coe also gets an epistle, from Bob of Hawker:
The ACT government calls the light-rail project a public-private partnership. Usually a PPP means both parties will put up some capital, share the profits and also share the risks. This means both parties have a strong incentive to plan carefully and both will evaluate their risks. However, the ACT government is paying for everything and accepting all patronage and revenue risk. This is not
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