Page 4606 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 19 October 2011
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Mr Seselja interjecting—
MR SPEAKER: Order! One moment, Ms Le Couteur. Stop the clocks, thank you. Mr Seselja, except for Mr Barr’s earlier interjections you were heard in silence, and I expect you and your colleagues to deliver Ms Le Couteur the same courtesy.
Mr Seselja: Sorry, Mr Speaker. Sorry, just on your ruling—
MR SPEAKER: There is no ruling, but—
Mr Seselja: If I can respond, you did not bring Mr Barr to order when he was heckling me earlier. I seek your explanation as to that treatment. You did point to the heckling of Mr Barr just now, but I do not recall you actually calling him to order.
MR SPEAKER: No; nor did I call you to order when you heckled at the start of Mr Barr’s speech. I let that go in the spirit of equality. Now I want to lift the standard a little bit here. Ms Le Couteur did not heckle anybody, and I think she could be shown a little bit of respect. Ms Le Couteur, you have the floor.
MS LE COUTEUR: As I was saying, the things that Mr Seselja notes in his motion are basically unexceptional. We are up to the ACT Chief Planner’s recent statements calling for decentralisation of government departments in the ACT. This certainly is an issue, particularly, for Gungahlin. The Greens are very pleased to see that the government has changed the plan of the government office building from the original plan of the former Chief Minister. We spoke about this with him many times in annual reports and estimates hearings and more privately—about the importance of having some ACT public servants in Gungahlin. We are very pleased that the government has changed its mind and will be putting some public servants in Gungahlin.
Yes, it is a fact that the government office building is planned to be the most expensive project. Obviously we would all agree that it is important to allocate capital to the most important project in the community. That is the job of this Assembly—to work out what are the most important projects. I remind Mr Seselja that no budget has yet been passed allocating $432 million on a government office building; that decision has yet to be made.
Lastly, the Greens have been talking about the high vacancy rate in the ACT office market for a long time and the fact that—from an environmental point of view, from an economic point of view and from the point of view of the government, which should be concerned about the interests of the ACT as a whole, not just their own short-term financial self-interest—the high vacancy rate in the ACT office market is an issue. One of the things it means is that there is a real possibility that the best solution could be reuse of one of the many existing buildings in Civic or potentially elsewhere. There is a real possibility that existing buildings could be effectively retrofitted. We are of course aware that there are a few buildings very close to this one that are expected to become vacant in the comparatively near future.
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