Page 1964 - Week 05 - Thursday, 5 May 2011
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thing. Whose initiative was that? The Canberra Liberals. And it was opposed at every step by Jon Stanhope and the Labor Party. It was described as redneck policy. So it does seem that if you oppose Jon Stanhope, if you disagree with him, then you are a redneck or you are a philistine or you are tiresome or you are tawdry.
I got an email today from Alison Ryan, who is the mother, if you recall, of Amy who died from a motor vehicle accident which was caused by a drug-affected driver. Her response was not that this is tiresome, tawdry or redneck but was:
I am pleased to hear some funding has been given to RRDT. Hooray!
So the community and those affected are saying hooray, while this government is abusing people and calling them rednecks, calling them philistines, saying they are tiresome, saying they are tawdry. The community, who have seen enough of this government, who have seen enough of its reckless spending, who have seen enough of the cost of living pressures and the failure to deliver hospital services, prison services or policy that is needed like RRDT, have had enough and they have seen from this budget just how out of puff this government is.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (5.28): Mr Speaker, this is largely a business as usual budget but it does have some very welcome green initiatives. It does not address the Assembly’s commitment to 40 per cent greenhouse gas reduction, peak oil or homelessness, to name but a few of the issues confronting Canberra. I will comment on both the good initiatives and some areas of business as usual as I quickly run through the parts of the budget for which I have portfolio responsibility for the Greens.
Moving first to office accommodation, the Auditor-General in 2009, in her audit of office accommodation, said there was a need for an office building strategy. There is still a need for an office accommodation strategy. This strategy should have a serious triple bottom line consideration of all options, including existing buildings. It should include the impacts of the government’s office accommodation decisions on things like transport and greenhouse emissions—things that are going to affect the whole of Canberra. What we are seeing is the government making the decisions and then maybe having a strategy afterwards. That is just silly.
We can see this in the decision in Gungahlin. The Greens support putting government staff in Gungahlin. We have been asking the government to do it for years. At estimates time last year we had the Chief Minister saying, no, this was definitely not on the agenda, it was out of the question. It is really a shame the government did not announce this earlier. It would have been good for the development of Gungahlin.
We support the idea of a centralised, co-located ACT government public service, but when we look at the office building proposal we should note that Civic currently has an office vacancy rate of about 18 per cent. If we look outside this building, there are two large office buildings near the Assembly which we would expect to be vacant in the next few years—Nara House, which has Customs, who have gone out to tender for somewhere else, and the commonwealth department of climate change, which we know will be moving to the new Nishi building.
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