Page 470 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 17 February 2016
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reality is that Mr Barr and Mr Rattenbury favour the tram, the first phase of which will service about one per cent of the population in peak hour, and they want to roll out a whole network across Canberra. We disagree with that. The reality is that that will afford us in government to allocate resources to other priorities. We have different priorities. We do not want the longest waiting times in Australia in our ED. We do not want schools that are over capacity. We do not want declining levels of usage of buses across Canberra. And I could list any number of other priorities. We will not be cutting police resources, and so on.
One slightly odd statement from Mr Rattenbury is that we did not support Mr Fluffy. That is outrageous. It is not true. It was actually the Canberra Liberals that led the charge on Mr Fluffy, getting immediate support for Mr Fluffy home owners. And I worked in a bipartisan fashion with Ms Gallagher to try and get as much money out of the feds as we could. I think she would attest to that. So that is an absolute nonsense claim.
As is much of what is in the amendments. The government has a strong track record of infrastructure? There has been infrastructure built; I do not deny that. We had a dam that went from $140 million to $409 million. We had a GDE that has been a debacle. We have a jail that has exploded in cost and is full despite our being promised it would not be. We have a secure mental health facility that we were promised would be open in 2011 that is not open. There is the bush healing farm. We have litigated dozens of these similar cases.
What about the health system? If the toxic culture we talked about yesterday, with the longest waiting times in an emergency department in Australia, is what they think is delivering on health, they are misguided. I would invite the Chief Minister to go down to the ED on a Friday or Saturday night and take a look for himself.
If cages in our schools is their claim for success in our education system, and overcrowded schools, again, that is a record of failure. Remember, as our schools are overcrowded, that it was Andrew Barr who cut 23 schools. Andrew Barr cut 23 schools. Let us not forget that for the parents who are struggling when schools are over capacity.
There are transport services that he lauds. The reality is that the usage of public transport has gone down under this government, particularly under Mr Rattenbury. As he focuses on the tram, we have seen fewer people using buses.
As I mentioned before, there is the issue of federal government reductions, also in health and education expenditure. Firstly, as we have litigated in this place before, the expenditure we are talking about was never in the federal budget. But I would like to see that money. Let me make no bones about it. Don’t think I want to see less money. I want to see more money. I want to see as much money as possible come into our health system.
When it comes to things like Gonski—if they had listened to my speech, they would have heard I said I support it, as I do the Shaddock review—the reality is that, because it is needs-based funding, when Ms Gallagher signed up to Gonski funding it actually
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