Page 2284 - Week 06 - Friday, 27 June 2008
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can do is to engage in the sort of gutless, snide personal attacks that we have seen here today, for which he is famous. Mark my words, Mr Speaker: the people of south Woden will see the record of Mr Mulcahy’s contributions to the debate in this place in the last couple of weeks about the power station, through the no-confidence motion, through the estimates and through the Appropriation Bill debate. They will be very clear about it and they will give him the boot.
More importantly, I will go back to the matter of ACTPLA. Minister, as I was saying earlier, you might argue, although you will not convince us, that, due to the constraints of the rules, there are only so many exercises that ACTPLA can undertake in terms of prior consultation. But as we have said in this place, when you have got a $2 billion project—one of the few projects that we have seen in the territory that is worth more than half a billion dollars in value—when you have got something of that magnitude, why does ACTPLA simply put up, on the fence line adjacent to the Mugga Lane tip, a yellow sign about the size of half of this desk? In Bugden Avenue, when roadworks are undertaken, municipal services put up signs three times the size. So for roadworks and road adjustments in Bugden Avenue, Gowrie, there are yellow signs, some metres square, to alert the residents to works, yet, hanging on the fence adjacent to Mugga Lane tip in the lead-up to the decision-making process about the siting of the gas-fired power station and data centre, there was a very small, yellow sign.
ACTPLA needs to have a good look at its communication with the community. It needs to have a good look at what “prior community consultation” means. When the government and its agencies have spent some months thinking about these concepts, looking at a number of options for land sitings, if they really want to sell such a valuable project to the community—and this is a very valuable project, Mr Speaker—they need to bring the community along with them.
The government has failed; the buck stops with the Chief Minister. It is the Chief Minister and his mates who have tried very hard to ram this whole project beneath the radar. All they have done is to bruise the community of the Tuggeranong Valley. The Tuggeranong Valley and southern Woden Valley communities are bruised. Whether they have trust in this government anymore to properly exercise these concepts remains to be seen. That is the challenge that you have, Mr Barr—whether you can now sell the data centre, the 18-hectare data centre, in—
Mr Corbell: Do you think it is a good idea, Steve?
MR PRATT: I think it is a lovely idea, Simon.
Mr Corbell: Do you think it is a good spot?
MR PRATT: But I have got more brains than you, mate; I would see it in a better place. You celebrate the fact—
Mr Corbell: Where would you put it, Steve?
MR PRATT: Your brains indicate that you would celebrate the placing. The residents of the southern Woden Valley ought to know that Mr Corbell is quite happy to see
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