Page 2696 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 21 September 2022
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Moving to a quarterly cycle would also save an estimated $1.7 million every four years. We have heard that the newspaper is not printed on recycled paper. Perhaps this is something that we should go back to. The Chief Minister made the point that it is done on sustainably managed forest paper. Wouldn’t it also be a good time to go to delivery four times a year, given that the recycled paper is not available at the moment?
I will move on to the comments by the minister for seniors and veterans, who cited the concerns of older Canberrans. I am thrilled with her comments, because it is great to see that this Labor-Greens government at last is acknowledging the existence of our older Canberrans—after years of neglect, after years of not really acknowledging them, after years of abandoning them and actively ignoring them, if not actively disliking them!
I have repeatedly argued in this place in favour of physical materials being accessible to seniors, to help keep them informed, given that some may be unable to access online materials. Many older Canberrans are absolutely comfortable with the online world. Many of those aged 55-plus have come through the public service, and it has been their day-to-day job to use computers. But that is not everyone, whether it is the much older people or people who have been in jobs in the workforce for whom computer use is not in their everyday life. We must make sure that we can accommodate them, and the hard-copy newsletter is fantastic for them.
I can assure members that older Canberrans are also very concerned about the environment. Older Canberrans feel that we should be looking after our environment. So there are differing narratives there. Changing the Our Canberra newsletter from 11 times a year to quarterly would not stop those people having a hard copy of the Our Canberra newsletter.
If the minister is concerned about older Canberrans accessing the Our Canberra newsletter, perhaps she could look at making the newsletter better suited to and more accessible for older Canberrans. For example, simple changes such as making the font larger would make it more accessible for older Canberrans, rather than seizing on the needs of older Canberrans as a convenient excuse for an 11-times-a-year newsletter.
Who exactly is completing this survey, saying that they read it every single time? For example, if four older Canberrans respond to the survey and three of them read it all the time, that is not a particularly representative example. No-one asked me, and I am in this group aged 55-plus. No-one has asked me if I read it all the time. In actual fact I do read it all the time, but this is usually accompanied by laughter and a certain amount of swearing, because the one I get says it is the Tuggeranong version of Our Canberra, and it is pretty hard to find what is relevant to Tuggeranong. We have seen that light rail is coming. Light rail is coming to Tuggeranong! I do not know that that will be in my lifetime.
It is something that we thought that the Greens would support, and that the Greens would not support this environmental vandalism being perpetrated by the Labor-Greens government, who love to say, “Don’t do as I do, just do as I say.” They love to virtue signal. They like to say, “We have to do this because it’s better for the
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