Page 1499 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 9 May 2017
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thing. The Greens certainly believe the community should have the opportunity to be heard about issues that are important to them. We believe in making decisions with the community for the community, which means knowing what the community thinks and feels strongly about. I do not think this a controversial idea, and all members of this place would say they support good genuine community consultation mechanisms.
What is bizarre about the new Liberal Party website is how strikingly similar it is to the government's your say online consultation portal. In fact, haveyoursay.net.au is so similar to yoursay.act.gov.au that it could be easy to confuse the two. What I cannot decide is whether this is designed to be deliberately deceitful and confusing, or whether it simply reflects the fact that the Liberal Party has so little imagination they could not think of a site name of their own.
I am concerned about this as it has the potential to undermine the system that allows people to provide their concerns and feedback to the government. I am concerned that this is a cynical and deceptive attempt by the Canberra Liberals to usurp existing community consultation processes and, on that basis, I think it needs to be called out.
Despite saying that he wants to enhance communication and consultation options for Canberrans, what Mr Coe has actually done is try to poach an existing and well-known name for his own political purposes. This creates a risk that Canberrans who genuinely want to provide feedback to the government about a particular issue will accidentally feed that information to the Liberal Party rather than the consultation process they actually want to participate in.
I also note that the have your say website is apparently, according to the Canberra Times, a key plank of the Liberal Party's strategy to win the next election. I would suggest that confusing the Canberra community is not going to be an effective strategy; It did not work with light rail and it will not work on community consultation. The people of Canberra want strong, progressive policies that make the ACT a better place to live, not recycling old ideas and dressing them up as something new.
I will leave it up to the public to decide whether the Canberra Liberals are trying to divert people away from the existing avenues for community consultation or whether
they are too lazy to come up with their own slogan and so decided to use someone else’s. Regardless of the motivation, this move is deceitful, and the Leader of the Opposition should rename his website to reflect its true purpose.
If the problem is one of creativity, I have taken the liberty of coming up with a few ideas. These may not be exactly what Mr Coe wants, and I confess to spending only a few minutes on them but, in the spirit of overcoming the writer’s block that has clearly affected the Liberals’ creative team, here they are: we could have “Lay it on the Liberals.net.au”, “Talk to the Tories.net.au”, “Complain to the Conservatives.net.au”, or my personal favourite, “E’Coe Chamber.net.au”.
This Assembly has a proud history of being accessible to the community and working for the people of Canberra, and it is important that this continues. The Legislative Assembly is made up of MLAs elected by the Canberra community to serve the
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