Page 39 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 10 February 2015
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Council’s fault, apparently, according to the Labor Party. As was so accurately reported in the CityNews, the email had gone out: “Get down to Tuggeranong Community Council tonight to support Joy.” The Labor Party attempted to stack that meeting. Karl Maftoum, their chosen spear-chucker on behalf of the minister—you should be really embarrassed about this, Chief Minister—actually attacked a volunteer president of the Tuggeranong Community Council and condemned him for not telling the people of Tuggeranong what the government was up to. It is everybody else’s fault except for the minister’s. This cannot continue.
As I said, this is a minister who fails to take responsibility. She fails to improve her performance, she fails to learn from her mistakes, she consistently fails to deliver, and she fails to change her ways. The minister got up in the Tuggeranong Community Council and called it chaos. Yes, it was, and it was chaos that caused people a lot of grief.
The premise was: “It’s public service holidays. Everybody will be away. Therefore it’s okay to close the road.” Half the people of the ACT do not work in the public service. I have an email from a lady who says that in her street of 11 houses only two were on holidays; only two had school-aged kids. The rest of them spent hours and hours, day after day, in the traffic debacle that this minister organised. Somebody—I think they were trying to help the minister, but I do not think it helped—at the Tuggeranong Community Council called it the face of the debacle. There we are; there is the face of debacle in the ACT: it is the face of the minister, Joy Burch.
This is the problem. We heard the renewal word—what, 18 times?—in the minister’s speech this morning. But what we have not seen is any change in the behaviour of this minister in the delivery of her responsibilities. Under Westminster, if she does not deliver, she should go. And she should go because the litany is long and damning. It is not just the note limit accepters; it is not just the traffic chaos on Tharwa Drive. It is distributing Labor Club material to school students in ACT classes; it is failing in her role as care and protection minister; it is the mismanagement of the education system; it is the overseeing of a bullying culture of harassment at the CIT; it is the closure of the Women’s Information and Referral Centre in Civic; it is putting Nazi strippers on stage at festivals; it is sending offensive tweets. All of these are bad judgement calls.
These are decisions made by the minister, and they are poor decisions. But the Chief Minister, Andrew Barr, in his quest for renewal, says it is okay. What is the bag limit on bad judgements? You cannot fix somebody who has chronically bad judgement, Madam Speaker. What you can do for the safety of the people of the ACT is remove them.
The problem for the people of the ACT is that the decisions the minister took were not based in fact. The questions that were asked at the community council revealed that the government had no idea of the traffic movements and no idea of the volumes of traffic at that time. There is this assumption. One constituent wrote to me and said, “I am sick of hearing everybody is away over January.” She points out the contradiction. She said:
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