Page 1357 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 25 March 2009
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sure the good people of Nicholls take their hats off to this government for the work that they have done over the last seven years in not fixing a problem that needed to be fixed.
The core reason why the car park should be upgraded is safety. There are rear collisions time and time again. If you speak to people at the takeaway shop, the IGA, the Chinese restaurant, the Italian restaurant or the beauty salon, they will tell you that they regularly see cars backing into each other. Yet here we are, four years on from when Ms Porter was elected and seven years on from when the government was first elected, and they still cannot fix the problem in spite of claiming they did so in 2004. They claim that they fixed it in 2004, but it was not fixed at all. Mary Porter thought that by clicking forward on the email it would be fixed, but I am afraid it was not fixed at all.
Let us go on to the concerns about sending all the traffic one way through Paisley Street. Paisley Street was never designed for that sort of traffic. It was never designed for up to a couple of hundred car movements a day. I am told that is what Roads ACT expects, that there will be 200 extra car movements through Paisley Street, as it currently stands. However, what Roads ACT have not factored into this is that a couple of thousand people are going to be moving into the suburb of Casey.
The suburb of Casey is right next to Nicholls and a lot of people from Casey will be going to the Nicholls IGA. They will be going to the Nicholls takeaway, the Nicholls Chinese restaurant, the Italian restaurant and the beauty salon. All those people will be using the Nicholls shops car park and creating far more than 200 additional car movements per day through Paisley Street. I hazard a guess that it may well be double that. This is a suburban street. It is a very quiet street that has a number of houses backing onto it, yet the Stanhope government is going to divert all the traffic through that street.
The people of Paisley Street did not know it was going to happen. The people of Decima Street did not know it was going to happen. The people of May Mills Street did not know it was going to happen. But Mary Porter still hit the forward button and gave herself a big tick. She said, “I’ve consulted. I’ve done the right thing. I’ve got another one towards my 1,300 total.”
When it comes down to it, it is about whether this government is actually committed to Canberra suburbs. It is about whether this government is actually committed to improving the lives of local residents and supporting small business. What this proposal says is that the Labor government does not care about small business; it does not care about retail. If they cared about retail, they would realise that this car park is having a negative effect on those businesses. They would realise that people in Nicholls avoid going to those shops. They avoid going to those restaurants because of the car parking situation there.
I find it staggering that here we are, seven or eight years on from when the Labor Party was first elected, and they are trying to blame a staffer from 2000 for this problem not being fixed. They have had eight years to fix this. They have had eight
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