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MR KAINE (3.50): Since Mr Osborne sat down, after introducing the subject, it has been interesting to see the patting on the back and the beating of the chest about all the good stuff that has been done or that it was promised would be done. But that is not what the matter of public importance is about. It is about the facilities that have not yet been provided; not all the good stuff that the Labor Party did or promised to do. I noticed that it was pretty strong on promises but not too good on delivery.

The fact is that in a community of 90,000 people there are community facilities and infrastructure that have not yet been provided. I do not think that anybody is under any illusions about that. I do not think that either of the Labor members from Brindabella, over the other side, is going to get up and say that all of the facilities, all of the infrastructure and all of the community facilities that are required by the 90,000 people in Tuggeranong have been provided by the Labor Party; they are not that dumb.

Mr De Domenico: I do not know.

MR KAINE: They might. We will let them go and see what they say. The fact is that there are many good services that exist in Tuggeranong. I have a litany of them, pages of them. It is all good stuff. People do not complain about the services that are there, but they do complain about the ones that are not there. I think that we are all pretty well informed on the kinds of facilities that have yet to be provided. I do not think that there is any mystery about it. The fact is that governments, no matter of what colour, have budgets to live with and have a limited amount of resources that they can allocate to the provision of public resources and infrastructure in new suburbs.

Mr Osborne said that you could not compare the mother with the two children in Banks with somebody that lived in Chifley 25 years ago. He is dead wrong. I have been in politics for nearly that long, and I know the problems that young mothers with children had in places like Charnwood and Holt a long time ago. They did not have a telephone on the corner; the bus did not run within a mile of their place; they had two kids that they had to do the shopping with; they had to use the bus, when it ran occasionally, because dad had to drive the family car to get to work. The circumstances are no different for a similar family in Banks today from what they were for that kind of family in Charnwood, McKellar or anywhere else 10, 20 or 30 years ago.

The fact is that when new suburbs develop it is beyond the capability of government to provide every facility that the community requires before anybody moves in. They are going to have to wait. I submit, Mr Osborne, that if you talk to some of the people who have been living in Gungahlin - some for a year or a year-and-a-half already - they have nothing; they do not even have a shop. It is purely relative. While it is timely that Mr Osborne should raise this matter, it is timely for the Government to stop and take stock once in a while as to where it is, what is still missing and what is still to be planned for and still to have resources allocated to it. I am not sure that the people in Tuggeranong are necessarily any worse off than people in suburbs at a similar stage of development anywhere in Canberra at any time in the past 30 or 40 years.


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