Page 2723 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 28 June 2011
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I will finish on a last note relating to the implementation of the Hawke review. It is interesting that we have had to change from departments to directorates to somehow establish a new one ACT public service. I always thought we had one public service. We certainly had it when we were in office. I think it is interesting, given the depth of the malaise that exists in this government, that a review that says there should be a change from departments to directorates and that shuffles some of the arrangements is being seen as some sort of way forward.
You will have one public service if you have leadership and you will have one public service if you have some respect. Many of us know that the genesis of the review was simply to get rid of the head of ACTPLA because he actually stood up to the former Chief Minister. In that regard, he has gained a lot of respect from a lot of people. But let us not sugar-coat this notion of one ACT public service. It used to exist. It existed under previous Liberal governments and it existed under previous Labor governments. The question you have to ask yourself is: why has it not existed under this government for the last 10 years? Fundamentally, it is because of the lack of leadership and a real appreciation of what a gem the ACT public service is and the way that many of the members of the ACT public service have been treated by this government.
The Hawke review is interesting and we will wait anxiously to see how it unfolds. But from what I am hearing from my contacts in the public service, what they are desperately looking for is not pat terms like “open” and “accountable”. They are actually looking for real leadership from the Chief Minister and the challenge is there on this one.
MS BRESNAN (Brindabella) (8.21): Firstly, I want to raise an important issue concerning the role of Chief Minister’s in the context of whole-of-government projects. One of the issues we learned through this budget is that the Chief Minister is very committed to the Majura freeway project and to getting the federal government to pay a share for this project. The government have said they will provide $144 million for this new freeway, although we have no actual funding allocation in this appropriation. The ACT government will use this money to fund the first two years of road construction. It is hoped that the federal government will pay the third and fourth years. However, as we learned in the estimates hearings, the government is planning for other ways of building this freeway if the federal government is not forthcoming.
I want to make one point about this, and it is a point I have raised in the Assembly before and one that I will discuss in more detail in response to the various portfolios that relate to transport. The point is that there is a marked contrast between the government’s efforts on road projects and on sustainable transport, revealing that the government strongly favours and prioritises road projects over sustainable transport projects. This prioritisation is evident in a variety of ways, but one clear indication is the contrast in lobbying efforts and financial commitments between projects such as the Majura freeway and an ACT light rail system.
Both Majura parkway and light rail have been the subject of bids to Infrastructure Australia, but light rail has now dropped from the government’s priority list completely. When asked in question time why this was the case, Mr Corbell simply
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