Page 154 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 February 2010

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private sector, the community sector, may be able to contribute to our housing problems in the ACT. They do not like to accept it.

I find it very hard to believe that the ACT government is seriously looking at these issues when it has a world view which, I think, is incompatible with the welfare of Canberrans. If you had an ACT government that had some ideas, had some strategy, was not as arrogant as to not even acknowledge that there is a housing problem in the ACT, maybe we would be in a situation that would actually suit more Canberra families.

Only the Canberra Liberals do have a strategy for bringing our housing difficulties under control, actually releasing land at a stable and constant rate so that the housing market can accurately predict what is going to be required and what the prices will be, what demand will be and what supply will be necessary in order to keep our market in equilibrium. What we have at the moment is an absolute disaster, and it is a great shame that so many Canberra families are driven into public housing by the ACT government, due to the gross mismanagement and inefficiencies of Housing ACT, stemming from the minister herself.

MR DOSZPOT (Brindabella) (12.05): I welcome the opportunity that Mr Seselja has provided here today with this motion. This is an opportunity to discuss some of the misconceptions that currently abound, specifically within the education sector—misconceptions, I might add, that have been perpetuated by the minister himself, misconceptions that our students are the best in the nation and misconceptions that our non-government or so-called blazer schools, as Mr Barr has been known to call them, are doing so well that they need no extra funding. Mr Barr often says in this place that the debate on non-government schools versus government schools is over. That is certainly not the case, especially when our non-government sector is so inequitably funded.

Mr Barr, in his response to Mr Seselja’s criticism of this government’s performance, certainly underlined the very facts that he was trying to counter. After eight years of a Labor government, the ACT community is paying more and getting less. The examples the education minister used on government expenditure and lower class sizes actually highlighted the lack of vision and performance of this minister and this government.

After continually criticising Liberal policy on lowering class sizes, a matter of a few weeks out from the election the now familiar Barr backflip occurred, a Barr backflip for which we should be holding up notice boards as to the effectiveness. That was, I think, a No 9 Barr backflip. Presto, the criticism morphed into an Andrew Barr initiative, from bagging the Liberals to stealing the Liberals’ policy.

He is starting to believe his own spin as he tries to justify this government’s lack of initiative and performance. The fact that he has spent the majority of the time running a narrative on his view of the opposition rather than refuting the opposition’s statements about his performance, and his government’s poor performance, says it all. Why not give a good spin rather than face up to this record?


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