Page 1894 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 25 June 2008
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Mr Stanhope’s attempts to catch up. And this is what happens when a government gets process wrong, badly wrong. That is what this motion is about, a government so out of touch that it believes due process does not apply, that community opinion does not matter and that the people will not care.
The people do care, and so does the opposition. Due process is not some annoying bureaucratic impediment to autocratic authority. It is the means by which the excesses of power are kept in check and the rights of the community are kept in focus. It is due process that has been missing in this process from the beginning and continues to this day. Since the flaws of this process have been made public, this government has done a series of backflips that make the Cirque du Soleil acrobats look somewhat static.
You only have to look at their own report given to them in September 2007 about the block the Chief Minister chose. He is the authorising agent. He wrote the letter. The brief says, “Mr Chief Minister, you have to pick. You have to tell ActewAGL they cannot have the block that they want.” And he did. You only have to go to the Hume industrial planning study final report of September 2007, where it talks about block 1610 district of Tuggeranong, and this is what it says:
This land is also separated from residential suburbs by a small ridge, which limits the longer-term potential for intensive industrial land uses that generate noise, pollutants and heavy vehicle traffic.
I think the residents there would say that the noise and the pollutants are the things that concern them most.
This report also shows that the block was locked away, because it actually says:
For the next three years, the broadacre part of 1610 will be held off from development and subject to a feasibility study for the cemetery site.
So you have got one arm of the government set up by Mr Corbell, started by Mr Corbell, finding the site and running in one way; but since Mr Corbell has lost planning it is all over the place, because the Chief Minister, as decision maker, cannot stick to the process.
We look at estimates and we look at what comes out of the estimates. And what we see is minister after minister finally acknowledging that they all had a role in this, because it was finally revealed that this decision went to cabinet. There is a cabinet decision.
The Minister for Health was not there and, as a shareholder of ActewAGL, she failed to apprise herself of what was going on. She is a shareholder. She had a responsibility. And we know that her department takes it seriously, because they said, “If this goes ahead, we have got to move the residents under our care. We have got to move the people from Symonston House, because you cannot live there in the shadow of this power station, in the shadow of this development.” We forgot to tell the residents that, didn’t we, minister, until it came out? And that is why we are here today, Mr Chief Minister, because you have not addressed any of these concerns of the people of the ACT.
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