Page 759 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 26 February 2013
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Mr Assistant Speaker, when will this government actually start to back away from its ideology and get a grasp of the practicalities, the practicalities that are just making the lives of Canberrans more difficult day by day and costing the people of Canberra more day by day? When will it realise that Canberra was designed as a passenger car city? That does not mean that we do not encourage the use of public transport, but it is a city built for the motor vehicle, with wide boulevards and arterial road networks. When will it realise that Canberra families have more running around to do each day and most Canberra families—about 90 per cent—are not able to get a bus from home to work because of the practicalities of their lives?
As I said, I would like to cite an example from my own experience. In 2008 my youngest son was about two. My wife wanted to go on a holiday, a long-planned holiday, to Italy with her sister. It had been a long-term ambition. She had planned to go. That was a great thing. It left me in charge of the kids, which was good experience for me. But the reality was then that I needed to get the kids, particularly my youngest son, to child care, which did not open until about 8.30. That meant that I could not get to work until about nine. The reality was that in the location where I worked there were no car parks after about 8.30.
I had this position where, if I was going to be looking after the kids, it was therefore impossible for me to go to work because I could not get a bus. There was no bus that would go from where I worked, past the child care—with a two-year-old, I would like to add—and then on to work. What was I to do? It forced me into a situation where, ultimately, I decided that pretty much the only solution was to take some time off work so I could do that.
The point is that if you reduce the number of car parks, wherever it is, you reduce the options for our families. If you reduce the options for mothers and fathers, people with complex lives, ultimately what it does is increase the stress on those people. It increases the complexity of their lives and it increases the cost of their lives.
The ideology that the Greens and Labor are driving at is to try and get everybody out of their cars whilst they drive their Prius motor vehicles and park them in the car parks outside this building. While they are making their own lives very simple, out there Canberra families would kill for what we have here, which is the luxury of a car park in Civic. We have got to be very careful when we make regulations in here, when we come up with policies, when we are trying to drive some sort of environmental policy, trying to push people onto buses, that we understand the impact on the mums and dads, the grandmothers and people trying to get about their daily lives.
Go out there and talk to people—people in Belconnen, people in Tuggeranong, people in Woden and Weston Creek. I have not met one person in the whole time that I have been out there doing this that says, “You know, Jeremy, I think we have too many car parks. I would like less parking.” I would defy anybody to say to me that they know a constituent who would say to them, “I want less car parking. This is too convenient.”
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