Page 2168 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 5 June 2019
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
fight for these promises in the 1,329 days he has been in this place already. To show up at the eleventh hour with some half-baked motion, grandstanding on an issue he knows nothing about and that the minister is revisiting, is ridiculous.
What we do not need to progress this issue is more community consultation, more talk and reports without real action. Mr Pettersson wants to learn about community consultation. That is what Alistair Coe and I have been doing as part of business as usual. We held a community barbecue in Casey in August last year to talk to locals about this failed commitment. In fact, we hold these community events in the community every month. When we went to Casey we asked the community what they wanted to see. Funnily enough, they said they would like to see things such as a playground, netball courts, indoor courts, lawn bowls, the community club, basketball courts, community gardens and plenty more other suggestions. If Mr Pettersson got out in the community and read and responded to the correspondence coming in then we would not need this motion.
The Canberra Liberals will be supporting this motion today, only because we hope that for Casey it will be a case of third time lucky. We had the $3 million promise made in 2012, we had the designs ready to go in 2016 and now in 2019 we have an audit and a commitment to community consultation. But I can tell you that the community is sick of the never-ending cycle of consultation and inaction. Just get on with it and build it. Whilst the community know that Mr Pettersson and his Labor Party colleagues are more interested in their pet projects, this motion gives us some hope that residents of Casey will see progress on this issue. You can guarantee that both Alistair and I will keep fighting for the residents of Yerrabi. Let us hope that for Casey it will indeed be third time lucky for this long-awaited community recreation and sporting facility.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (5.34): I will be supporting Mr Pettersson’s motion today; how could you not? What the motion calls for appears to be both inoffensive and sensible. I am not quite sure why we are doing it.
Going to the motion’s points in turn, the first thing is that Gungahlin is Australia’s second fastest growing region in Australia. Yes, good; I am glad we are all on the same page with that. The next part, (1)(b), contains three more statements of the obvious. The motion could go on for a long time, noting all of the wonderful and marvellous things that the ACT government is doing in Gungahlin, but the other way of looking at this, which is possibly the way that the people of Canberra would look at it, is that the government is simply doing its job. The ACT government needs to provide services for the growing regions of Canberra.
The motion calls for the ACT government to commence community consultation as soon as possible for community facilities in and around Casey. That seems fair enough. Community consultation in general is a good idea. The people who live or work in Casey deserve to be consulted, as with people in any other suburb. But shouldn’t the government be doing this everywhere in Gungahlin that warrants community consultation—indeed across Canberra? Is the motion necessary because there has been a lack of community consultation in Casey?
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video