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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Wednesday, 3 March 2004) . . Page.. 624 ..

That is not a social plan. All this is a glossy; this is an excuse for not doing anything. So you have a report, you say you are going to implement something, you are going to come up with a plan that will have a strategy and some goals, but you use it as an excuse for no activity over 2½ years. And over 2½ years that is what we have had from this government—inactivity.

What we see from this government is a lack of decisiveness. They have not set themselves serious goals. I said that this is just more hot air from the chief windbag. Go back to about 1987 when Mr Hawke, the then Prime Minister, said no child shall live in poverty by 1990. It reeks of the same sort of thing—nobody shall be poor, nobody shall be disadvantaged, nobody shall be uneducated, nobody shall be left out, nobody shall be not included. Tell us how, tell us where, tell us when. Tell us what you are going to fund so that we can have some faith in that.

All we get are four targets. They are important targets—to reduce long-term unemployment, inequality, homelessness, and increase qualifications—but they are irrelevant because of the timeframes that have been attached to them, and they are made irrelevant by the lack of action and the lack of decisiveness in this document.

This is a document two and a bit years in the making. It is just another glossy from a glossy government—that is all it is; it is just gloss because there is no substance in it. These are all statements of the bleeding obvious, these are all statements of things that government should do anyway.

Mr Speaker, some of actions in the document are a reiteration of election commitments that were made more than two years ago, and some of them are a reiteration of things that the government has been possibly doing already. That is not a plan; that is not a strategy. Yes, there was an opportunity and we are told that the community is saying, “Yes, we welcome it.” If you want to put out a press release saying that the community welcomes it, that is fine. If you want to see that as a glowing endorsement, go for your life. But the overwhelming sense we get from the community is that the jury is still out. We obviously now have to wait for the budget process. The pressure is on because there are other competing plans to be funded. We will make a real determination when we see the bucks.

MR CORBELL (Minister for Health and Minister for Planning) (11.22): Mr Speaker, I am going to speak only briefly today. I want to rebut some of the arguments that Mr Smyth has made in this debate. I think the Liberal Party must be the only organisation in this city that has criticised and been negative about this document. Every other sector in the community has said, “This is the right thing for the government to be doing.” Perhaps this is because the Liberals just do not understand what strategic planning is about. Perhaps it is that they just do not understand how you put together a long-term framework to guide the future development and growth of our city.

Of course, perhaps that is indicated by the failure of previous Liberal administrations to even get close to producing a comprehensive plan for the future of Canberra. They had a couple of goes. Kate Carnell had a couple of big talkfests at Old Parliament House. It all fell in a heap in this place. The Assembly knocked it on the head. It said it was not a good idea, that it was poorly worked out and that it did not have the social component, for example. The Liberals never attempted to put together some social planning

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