Page 1354 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 5 April 2005
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
more things, and I say to the minister, as I always do when I stand to speak, that I am happy to talk to him about more ideas that I have.
I was recently astonished to learn, in an answer to a question I placed on the notice paper, that the government does not seem to have any relationship with the Conflict Resolution Service. I am asking: why not? Why doesn’t Housing ACT formally refer tenants to the CRS? The minister’s answer implies that tenants are therefore “informally” referred.
Mr Hargreaves: We do.
MRS BURKE: Not in your answer, minister; you said no and that that is as far as the department goes with the problem. Is that as far as you go? That seems very odd to me, but the minister is making some grumbling so he might have a logical response for that and he might share that with us.
Further issues to be investigated would include undertaking a comprehensive evaluation of the current total facilities management process to determine what changes are required to improve the effectiveness and viability of this maintenance service. Minister, I realise that this service has been and is going through a tender process and I hope that we will know the outcome of that soon. I would suggest that far too much of taxpayers’ money has been and still is being wasted under the current system.
Finally, it is time that the government, starting with the minister, began to realise that all is certainly not rosy within Housing ACT, and the quicker he gets to the root cause of the problem the better it will be for both tenants and staff alike.
MR HARGREAVES (Brindabella—Minister for Disability, Housing and Community Services, Minister for Urban Services and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (4.14): I welcome the opportunity to respond to the matter of public importance raised by Mr Smyth about the level of service delivery to tenants of Housing ACT. I congratulate the Leader of the Opposition for reading Mrs Burke’s opening speech, which she should have read herself. I want to make a couple of observations before I launch into a response.
Firstly, Mrs Burke said in her speech that we should be providing comparable service to that of the private sector. I would like to know the last time that Mrs Burke took apart Raine and Horne, Leader Real Estate or Paradime, or any number of the bodies corporate, about dysfunctional people in those multiunit complexes around our electorate, for example. I suspect, in fact, that that has not happened. What is happening is that Mrs Burke puts a burden of responsibility on Housing ACT that she does not share with the private sector. So I think we need to have a little bit of consistency here and start acknowledging the extra responsibility that Housing ACT accepts for its clients.
Mrs Burke: They weren’t my words; they were your words.
MR HARGREAVES: Mrs Burke does not remember what she said. I suggest she reads her own speech in Hansard. She has to read her own speech in Hansard for her own education—that’s a bit sad, isn’t it?
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .