Page 4060 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 16 Sept 2009

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move between jurisdictions, they should not have to deal with different systems in different circumstances.

Indeed, it is in marked contrast to the approach adopted by the Liberal Party in this place that wants to adopt some sort of stand-alone, different approach to warnings compared to what the rest of the country is doing. That will just lead to confusion; that will just lead to more problems than it solves.

MR SPEAKER: Mrs Dunne, a supplementary question?

MRS DUNNE: Thank you. Minister, in relation to hazard reduction burning, why was such a small area of land subjected to controlled burns in 2009 when you have subsequently described the upcoming bushfire season as “the most serious fire weather season we have experienced in the last two or three years”?

MR CORBELL: I do not consider 12,000 hectares of hazard reduction activity small, Mr Speaker.

National Folk Festival

MS BRESNAN: My question is to the minister for the arts and concerns the recent decision to provide $90,000 over three years to the National Folk Festival for fringe arts performance. What questions did the arts minister ask or what information did he seek about the agreement made between the Minister for Multicultural Affairs and the Folk Festival, and can that agreement be tabled in the Assembly?

MR STANHOPE: I thank Ms Bresnan for the question. Ms Bresnan, the funding of the Folk Festival was a decision of the Minister for Multicultural Affairs in relation to an allocation of funding that was relevant to his department and his departmental responsibilities. Certainly, the Folk Festival might be described as an arts festival subject to festival funding. The Multicultural Festival might be a festival that might be subject, in a broad interpretation, for festival funding, but it is not. The Multicultural Festival is funded separately from the festival’s arrangements, the festival’s structure and the festival’s appropriation.

The appropriations that the Minister for Multicultural Affairs receives for the purposes of the delivery of the Multicultural Festival are funds and responsibilities which the Minister for Multicultural Affairs pursues. He discussed some of his thinking around the future of the Multicultural Festival, including the Fringe Festival, with me, but at the end of the day Mr Hargreaves made decisions in relation to funding allocated to him and that had been utilised previously to support the Fringe Festival as an arm or as an extension of the Multicultural Festival. The decisions that he has subsequently taken and announced were decisions taken and announced by him in the context of his responsibilities as Minister for Multicultural Affairs.

MR SPEAKER: Ms Bresnan, a supplementary question?

MS BRESNAN: Thank you, Mr Speaker. What development outcomes will be required of the National Folk Festival to justify the investment?


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