Page 3457 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 22 August 2018
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to a lesser extent, Cooleman Court in Weston—although many people in Weston think their problems would be solved if only there were local shops in Molonglo. Secondly, there should be a focus on getting new playgrounds and parks built adjacent to local shops, notably in Farrer and Waramanga. That was something that Minister Fitzharris talked about. Thirdly, there should be a lot more emphasis on maintenance in their local area—on the streetlights that do not work or on filling the potholes. People in my electorate are not complaining—to me, at any rate—about the local shops.
The more systematic way to look at it is through public participation. Minister Fitzharris talked at some length about the better suburbs process, so I will not go into this process in huge detail. I was privileged to go to part of the afternoon session on Sunday, and it seemed that it was working well in terms of participatory budgeting and deliberative democracy. That is certainly something that we need more of in this area of the budget. Members may remember that last year we passed a motion about participatory budgeting. This sort of motion and these sorts of needs are the reasons why the Greens think that deliberative democracy and participatory budgeting are the way to go to reduce the conflict about where money in that area should best be spent.
I will now turn to the amendment. It does remove from the motion material that I disagree with, and which I spoke about earlier. But it also contains two things that I actively support. The first is paragraph (3)(b), about public toilets in new local centres. This is really important because a lack of public toilets is something that I hear about from the community.
Those of us who travel around Canberra a lot may notice that in the older suburbs originally the toilets were in the local shops. Downer in fact had toilets, which closed during the period of decline of the Downer local shops. O’Connor and Lyneham also spring to mind. At some point, possibly as far back as the 1970s, this stopped being part of the NCDC’s brief. I am told, for instance, by a Cook resident—Ms Fitzharris may have dealt with this matter; I am not sure—that they did not have public toilets until recently, when the ACT government installed them, following community requests.
Public toilets may not be of importance to all members, but from what I have heard from the community they are definitely of great interest to parts of our ageing population. One of the things that can happen as you get older is incontinence. I know of people who, when they are working out whether they can go out, check to see whether there is a toilet nearby that they can get to quickly, just in case. Pregnant women can also find that this is an issue. Of course, parents of children who are toilet training also find this to be a considerable issue. Many of us have been through that as parents.
In an ideal world, all centres would have public toilets, but we do have a very large number of gaps to fill in existing centres, and that would be a pretty large expense. As I said earlier, expenditure has to be prioritised between all the competing demands for city services. Public toilets for each local centre may be something that is recommended out of better suburbs, or it may not.
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