Page 446 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 18 March 2014
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ACT government, and probably the ACT Assembly more broadly, is to maintain levels of confidence and cohesiveness across the community, particularly when the times get more challenging as we expect they will throughout the course of this year.
We have been looking at ways to be strategic with our own investment and the reform process and packages we have underway. If you look at some of our big project items, you will see that some city building projects like capital metro are much more than just smart transport or a public transport system for Canberra. We know of the experience in other areas where the right integrated public transport has been put in place.
When you are putting in high quality public infrastructure, it drives other areas of the economy and investment. It can create huge opportunities for cities where it is done well. We acknowledged at the beginning of this project the importance of getting good leadership in early, putting the investment in early to make sure that we are resourcing it appropriately, to make sure we can return to the community the uplift and the potential that can come from such a transformational project.
It is not just about 12 kilometres of track from Gungahlin into the city; it is changing the way our public transport system operates. It is changing the way the city moves and it is providing a spine and a framework for a transformation of the corridors along which that light rail operates. There is a huge amount of work underway now by Capital Metro Agency, led by Minister Corbell, to make sure that this project delivers what we expect it will and that it will be very, very positive for the ACT community.
In similar vein, we have some of the other projects we are working on. We are really pushing forward with the digital Canberra program. It is often hard for the community to see changes to IT systems because a lot of the first changes that are put in place across government and businesses are the back-end support systems that make doing our jobs easier but that are less obvious to the community.
That is why I was very keen to talk about the digital Canberra action plan, which I have worked carefully with the local technology and innovation sector to prioritise. There are always a lot of projects that are out there to be supported but we have found a small amount of money—$4.4 million—which will help to really kick start not just our own processes in the public sector but to look at how we provide a very visual demonstration to the community that we are changing as a city.
We are really moving into our second century and a part of that is becoming a truly digital city. There is absolutely no reason why it cannot work in Canberra. We have the highest levels of connectivity anywhere in the country. People are connected. People go to the internet to get their information. I think that young people are much more able to navigate through technology than perhaps people of my generation, and they are demanding that.
They are demanding it in schools; they are demanding it in their private lives in the way they socialise. That is where things like the free wi-fi that will start in Canberra in Civic from the second half of this year are such important projects. We know that they are great for people on low incomes in terms of sharing the benefits that come
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