Page 280 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 31 May 1989
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
all around the country, including all around our area, and overseas, this national institutions theme be expanded and that it not be seen as boring. I want to come back to that, briefly, in a moment.
We want them to see the national museums of various kinds, not only the one which I know the Chief Minister and her party supports and which we all support but also the ones that we already have, like the Australian War Memorial and so forth. Again, I will not dwell on this one; I hope I will have a chance to do it on another occasion. I see education as not only education, not only as an industry, but also as an enormous way to pull in people for very long periods. That, in itself, is a huge subject and sometime I would love to have the chance to talk about Boston, Massachusetts, as a place that makes education a tourist industry.
Of course, I agree with all that has been said about leisure activities, relaxation, entertainment and sport, but I would want to argue that it is long-term developments, not short-term ones, that we want. We need new national and international facilities, perhaps the kinds of international agencies - arbitration agencies and commissions - that pull in people on a huge scale. We want people constantly coming to this city for its national and international roles.
I would want to argue - I will say this quickly - that one of the worst possible developments for a national capital is a short-term, short-sighted, short-visioned concept to put in place a facility inappropriate to the very nature of our city, a planned national capital. I would, in particular, ask the Minister to consider comparable cities around the world; not Perth, Hobart, Adelaide or Darwin - all regional and essentially parochial cities, which are not national capitals; not London or New York or Tokyo, which are megalopolises. Neither New York nor Tokyo, by the way, has gambling casinos. We need to see ourselves in our essence, in our very being, not as just one more gambling casino city. I think in particular of Washington, DC; Ottawa, Canada; and Wellington, New Zealand. That is the company we keep. That is the company we should continue to keep.
But I will not elaborate further; there will be other times to do that. Basically though I want to say to the Chief Minister, the Deputy Chief Minister and their colleagues that we strongly support their tourism initiatives.
MR DUBY (11.20): Mr Speaker, I would like to endorse the statements made by the members of the other parties here today. There is no doubt in all our minds that tourism will be the economic wherewithal by which the economy of the ACT shall develop. But one short point which I feel I would like to introduce to the debate and something which I have not heard expressed by other speakers is that, whilst the influx of people to this city is something for which we
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .