Page 577 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 14 March 2007
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This statue has captured the imagination of a lot of people, because it represents the completely misguided policies of the government of Jon Stanhope and his colleagues—a government that in fact failed to warn the people of Canberra in relation to the fires some years ago and has run down basic services, but now wants to honour one of its own with a statue that will cost $72,325—and I understand there are further costs involved in the installation of this statue.
One woman who rang my office said that the St Vincent de Paul Society has been trying to get 10 extra homeless beds for years. Maybe this amount of money would not pay for all those beds, but it would go some way towards helping. The woman also spoke of the 40 per cent hike in taxes in the ACT just for ordinary people in the latest budget. Most people in Canberra have been impacted in a very negative way by the government’s last budget.
The government have removed $9 million from public housing and services for the homeless. People are now queuing for most of their lunch hours to pay for car registrations and the like at the shopfronts that remain open after the government closed the Civic shopfront. And what did the government say? The minister said there was an increasing use of the internet for making payments. This is their way of saying, perhaps in the immortal words of Marie Antoinette, “Let them eat cake.”
The minister who wants to put this statue up has closed the Griffith library, without consultation, six weeks after announcing it, at the end of November last year, to save several hundred thousand dollars. The community from far and near who used that library were angry at that and disappointed, and the minister said that they could use the new Civic library and that at any rate more people were using electronic services. He did not say anything about the old and the young who are not able to go into the city to use the library. Library hours on weekends and evenings have also been savagely cut, which means libraries are simply not as accessible as they were to a working population.
Then we have the chaos with the bus services where people have immense difficulty getting from A to B, and we are even getting outrages such that some poor bus driver had his nose broken yesterday amid the outflow of anger from the public, who are sadly at times taking it out on bus drivers.
So there are some huge problems that this government should be addressing, rather than going off on a tangent and addressing vanity projects and focusing on absolutely the wrong priorities. Of course we also have the closure of 23 schools and the $128 million prison, which will cater for a very small and, it seems, diminishing prison population of not many more than a hundred. Again, perhaps the government’s policies there might have some impact on that in terms of continually knocking back attempts to ensure that people who commit serious crimes actually do serve the time. The government of course also are still not off the hook with the Civic to Belconnen busway—to save three minutes, at a cost potentially of over a hundred million dollars. Then there is the arboretum.
The government think nothing of spending money on things people do not want. They also recently spent $68,000 on a glossy brochure to advertise their wonderful deeds,
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