Page 819 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 27 February 2013
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
But the things that the people of Lanyon were most interested in were a green bin and a pool. Why? It was because they were relevant to what they wanted and what they needed. The Liberal Party have a proud tradition of supplying community facilities to the Lanyon valley. You only have to reflect on the youth centre down there, a Liberal Party initiative. It is a Liberal Party initiative. We will continue to keep up the pressure to provide more facilities for the neglected part of the electorate that the Labor Party took for granted. That electorate showed the Labor Party what they thought of them.
It is interesting that we hear the call for the library. In one of the articles from the Canberra Times that I have been able to find, a TAMS spokesperson then said that there were no current plans for additional libraries in the ACT. The government have consistently said since they came to office that there should not be more libraries. On a number of occasions I have raised the issue of everybody being within five kilometres of a library. The standard that we were moving towards was that everybody should be in proximity of a library down to a three-kilometre range. That, of course, would make a library necessary in Lanyon.
But the Greens did not bid for the money. The person who made that promise did not get a seat and the Green vote in Lanyon collapsed because the people of Lanyon told us, because we went out and spoke to them, that what they wanted was a pool.
Ms Burch, who found Lanyon 43 seconds from the end of her speech and spoke about it to 21 seconds from the end of her speech, asked whether I know where the aged-care facilities are in Lanyon. Yes, I doorknocked them all. They were surprised. Guess what, Madam Deputy Speaker? Nobody from the Labor Party had bothered to go and doorknock there. They were quite shocked and disappointed.
But a number of them said to me that that is what they expect from a government that had grown tired and arrogant. If you want to know where this comes from, it comes from the people. How do we know that? We know it because we were out talking to them. You can ask Mr Wall. I am sure he will get up and talk about his doorknocking experiences. You can ask Zed about the afternoon. There we were doorknocking Banks together as a team because we had a team in Lanyon. We were working as a team. All of us were at the Banks shops listening to what the people were telling us. The constant feedback was, “Give us a bin and give us a pool.”
Why did they want a pool? It was because they knew that southern Canberra was unrepresented. It lacked the necessary pool lanes to allow them to get their swim classes and to exercise. Indeed, we know the government have got a report on pools because they sat on it for 11 months. Again, I quote from the Canberra Times,
The document … suggests that the southern side of Canberra has a “substantive deficiency” of appropriate modern aquatic facilities …
You have got this deficiency. We propose an answer to it and all we get is ridicule from the government and from the lone Green. It is interesting. Mr Rattenbury says
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video