Page 3483 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 17 September 2019
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Stromlo facility. It caught me by surprise, but I thought, “Well, she’s the minister. She probably does know something, and maybe she does know more than I do.”
I went back and looked through all of the specs for the aquatic centre; no mention of hydrotherapy. I decided that I would write to the sports minister. As I have said in this place before, there was a great deal of misleading of the public going on, because that factoid—so-called fact—given by Minister Fitzharris was repeated by the Chief Minister on Chief Minister talkback on at least one occasion. I decided to write to the sports minister, who wrote back to me and said, “No, there’s been a complete misunderstanding. There is not going to be a hydrotherapy pool.”
For months, until I got a definitive answer from the minister for sport about this, there was an untruth out in the community, which this government allowed to be dangled there, that they had a solution for hydrotherapy on the south side, and it was a hydrotherapy pool at Stromlo Forest Park. It was not true. It was never true, and the previous minister and the Chief Minister let that misinformation dangle out in the community for quite some time. It was only when Minister Berry was forced to answer my question directly, months later, that that untruth was put to bed.
The thing about this Labor government is that they cannot be trusted in anything that they say. Minister Fitzharris closed down the whole line of questioning about the hydrotherapy pool in estimates by saying, “Don’t you worry; we’re building one at Stromlo.” She closed it down. It was inconvenient. It was inconvenient for her to be scrutinised about a failure of the government, and it showed that this government cannot be trusted. They will say anything, absolutely anything, to make their life easier, and this is what happened.
What I eventually got back was, “It’ll be a warm pool where you can possibly do exercise, as long as you want to share it with the kids who are learning to swim.” That is a paraphrase. They are not the exact words but that is a paraphrasing of what the minister said. It would be a combined pool, not warm enough to be a hydrotherapy pool, and a learn-to-swim pool. It is entirely and completely inappropriate for hydrotherapy.
I actually think that Stromlo Forest Park would be a fantastic site for a public hydrotherapy pool. It is pretty central, and if you actually had a transport system that worked it would be a place that many people on the south side of Canberra could reasonably easily access. If you are building a number of other swimming pools, there are relative economies of scale with building another pool there. You already have the lifeguards, so the whole system would work better.
Many of the people that Mrs Jones, Ms Lawder and I have been dealing with over the hydrotherapy issue have told us about the council-funded public hydrotherapy pools that they visit when they are travelling around the country. They can go to Kiama and visit a public hydrotherapy pool. They can go to various places on the south coast, the mid-north coast and places like that, where they might be holidaying, and they do not have to put their lives on hold because councils use ratepayers’ money to build hydrotherapy pools. Who would have thunk it? Who would have thought that that would be such an issue?
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