Page 2578 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 10 August 2016
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MS FITZHARRIS: The Canberra Liberals’ own website states, and I will say it again, that the cost of light rail is $707 million.
In reality, as those opposite know, the light rail contract represents less than one per cent of the ACT budget. In fact, the first stage of light rail will be running up and down Northbourne Avenue and Flemington Road before we start making payments to these operators. And for every $1 we spend on light rail we will spend $24 on education and $33 on health.
Labor knows that we always spend more on health and education, because we know just how important these services are to a strong, healthy and vibrant community. As a Labor government, our focus is on growth, opportunity and fairness in our community. We are focused on health, education and jobs, and we are investing in the services our growing city needs now and into the future. We are delivering better hospitals and health care. This includes investing in the new teaching hospital at the UC campus in Belconnen and providing more funding for palliative care services, stroke services, rehabilitation, cancer services, aged care and community care, just to name a few.
The University of Canberra public hospital will be a state-of-the-art teaching and training hospital that will transform subacute services in our region and train the nurses and doctors of the future. Our investment in our nurse-led walk-in centres offers all Canberrans free access to health care and advice. These are so popular that, if re-elected, Labor has committed to building more in Gungahlin and in Weston Creek.
In addition to health, we are investing more than ever in our schools and education system—everything from bigger and better classrooms to world-class VET facilities and more funding to help fund the next big research breakthrough. We are investing $20 million in Gungahlin schools, $525,000 in the medical research commercialisation fund, and funds for better preschool facilities. We recently opened the state-of-the art CIT Tuggeranong campus—all this and still delivering better transport and still balancing our budget.
The ACT government is also funding high quality local services. This budget allocates more money to mowing our suburbs, to building and resealing our roads, to the upkeep of our local shopping centres and to better playgrounds and parks—and much, much more. We are delivering green waste bins, with a pilot to start in Weston Creek and Kambah before rolling them out to the rest of the city. We are boosting our mowing budget and upgrading more than 40 playgrounds across the city in this year’s budget. If re-elected, Labor will deliver a bulky waste pick-up service for all households in Canberra. We are doing this sustainably and responsibly, and we will build light rail at the same time, creating more than 3,500 jobs.
If you listen to those opposite, Madam Speaker, you would think our economy was in dire straits. Yet we have retained our AAA credit rating—under threat from the commonwealth, from the federal Liberal government. We have retained high wages and high quality local services. Unemployment in the ACT is the lowest in Australia despite significant attacks on Canberra’s jobs by the federal Liberal Party. And Canberra is consistently rated as the world’s most livable city, with the highest quality of life.
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