Page 3943 - Week 10 - Thursday, 28 August 2008
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
approached other members’ offices. Members of the public should not be forced into a situation where the only way they get satisfaction is having to make a noise in ministers’ offices. This is not the way you run a health system. This is a failure of delivery of everyday services for people in the ACT.
We have seen in the last little while a discussion of the unit title system. We have the evidence of people who have been waiting years for a functioning unit title system. But what we have seen in the last year or so are people who engaged in consultation in good faith. However, the legislation that they thought they would see has not emerged. We saw forced through this week legislation which will make the situation of unit titles just as unworkable but in different ways.
What more basic service could we have than the provision of affordable housing in the ACT? But the ACT government has a monopoly control over land release. Labor policies have restricted competition and deliberately limited land supply to well below demand for many years. This has been at the root of the ACT’s housing affordability crisis. It is a mismanagement of land supply. It is a mismanagement that was initially overseen by Mr Corbell as Minister for Planning and it is now being overseen by the Chief Minister as the minister responsible for land allocation. Labor has escalated the cost of land in this town to a point where many young Canberrans cannot afford to buy a home in the town that they grew up in.
On top of this, we see the compounding of the better, faster, cheaper new planning system which has resulted in planning delays and a backlog of planning approvals, again something which is driving up the cost of housing for everyday Canberrans. In addition to driving up the cost of housing, we have monumental failures like the Gungahlin Drive extension, which is almost iconic, I suppose. One of my colleagues referred to it recently as the Gungahlin Drive exhaustion or the Gungahlin Drive exasperation because of the emotions that people experience when they sit in traffic of a morning. They see the money that has been spent by the Stanhope government—$120 million—on a road that provides one lane in each direction. It is a road which they knew in 2004 would be a great road for 22 hours a day. During the two hours a day when people are really needing to use it, it is in gridlock; it is at a standstill.
It is made worse at the moment, Mr Assistant Speaker. It was interesting that Mr Hargreaves said earlier this week that we really did not expect so many people would use it. I think they were trying to hide the fact that the Gungahlin Drive extension was there. But people did use it and, lo and behold, the government has now been forced much quicker than it expected—not much quicker than anybody else expected—to do road works to alleviate some of the more ridiculous choke points along the way. In the process, they are creating more choke points than there were before.
In addition, I would like to turn just briefly to my own electorate of Ginninderra. The delivery of education services in Ginninderra has been substantially disrupted over the last few years by the Stanhope government. I refer in particular to the closure of the west Belconnen school. The school board and the P&C went to the government and said: “We are concerned that this is a high school with low enrolments. Can we have a conversation about what we might do?” They were told: “Don’t worry about it. It is
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .