Page 1140 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 7 May 2014
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When people travel in our city to work or to do business or to visit friends and family, they want to be connected by the best road system in Australia. And we want that too. We want to make it easier to drive and park your car, while Labor is deliberately trying to make it harder. The Labor government and their Green ally have not made the case for light rail. And Mr Coe will expand on this argument in detail in his motion later today but, put simply, the $614 million that is the proposed expenditure, as I understand it, at the moment for light rail is the price that the Labor Party has put on securing Shane Rattenbury’s support to form government and is a debt that Canberra families will be paying off for generations. Our transport plans will be focused on making it easier to get around Canberra, not on an ideological and unaffordable indulgence.
Because Canberrans are a caring and generous people, they want us to ensure Canberra is a safe and compassionate community. We will work to expand and enhance existing partnerships with the community sector in delivering services for the most vulnerable in our society. We will restore the balance of justice in Canberra to make sure that victims are not let down, so that the police and DPP are properly resourced and empowered, so that delays are reduced in our courts and so that violent and repeat offenders are properly punished and bail is not simply a revolving door. We will not let police numbers dwindle in our city to a point where front-line police officers become so concerned for their own safety that they are forced to submit Comcare reports after their pleas for more staff are repeatedly ignored by this government.
Improving the quality of life in our city is not only about the front-line services that the government delivers, it is also about how we live our lives. Together with local communities, we will support and promote cultural, sporting and recreational opportunities that are so important to our way of life. Our focus will be local—local sporting groups, local community groups and local artists.
Lastly, if we are to deliver on all that great promise that Canberra has to offer, we must give this territory better economic management. The Labor government and the Greens proudly say that they want to be the most extreme government in the country in terms of environmental and social policy. However, our conversations with Canberrans suggest that they reject extremism and would rather a government that would interfere less in their lives and focus more on the services, especially the cost of those services.
Canberrans are generous people but they are also smart, and they understand that no government can continue to spend beyond its means without long-term consequences. This is already the highest taxing government per capita anywhere in the country. The borrowings of this government, already $2.7 billion, rise to $3.5 billion in the next three years. The accumulated interest bill in the current budget totals over $650 million.
The hundreds of millions of dollars wasted in decades of delay on major capital projects has been a disgrace. The GDE took longer than the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The jail blew out by tens of millions, was late, is already full and is now costing
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