Page 3219 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 23 August 2017
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In 2017, the city to the lake project, once a grand plan, has now become apartment blocks and a boardwalk. There is not necessarily anything wrong with the change of plans per se. Plans do change; infrastructure planning must have some flexibility in it. But the government should have gone back to the community to consult about this. The big plan of stadiums, convention centres and pools is very different to what we are now seeing being delivered at the lakefront.
Sir Robert Menzies is remembered for creating the lake, which is now one of the centrepieces of our city, the largest purely ornamental lake in the world, as I understand it. Equally, the Chief Minister can be now remembered for not only filling in a piece of that lake for a boardwalk, but depriving the people of Canberra of the vista that is the West Basin and Acton Peninsula to allow units to be built there without constructing the assets and amenities that were previously promised with this project.
Mr Pettersson’s motion also makes reference to education infrastructure, that the government is spending more money in ACT schools to expand their capacity. Obviously, this is a positive thing. It is no secret that our schools in the ACT are under enormous enrolment pressure and that the ACT government needs to better manage the education system in order to cope. We have the government trying to rezone school halls and libraries as classrooms so as to allow more students to enter each school.
Of course, we may not have been under such pressure if it had not been for Mr Barr’s decision to close 23 schools in 2006 when he was the education minister. Mr Barr clearly did not think that this infrastructure should be maintained for future use. The closure of so many schools resolved a short-term political challenge, but has created a long-term problem, a problem that will continue to affect the people of Canberra until the government takes it seriously.
One very small example in terms of numbers is the ongoing impact this has had on the village of Tharwa, whose school was closed. People in Tharwa still talk about the need for a school in their village. The school closures brought about by Mr Barr were supposed to fix education issues but they have only worsened them. The government was warned about closing schools at the time but those warnings were ignored.
I turn to the health infrastructure, which was mentioned in Mr Pettersson’s motion. I nearly laughed when I saw this. In a week when the government has been under a lot of pressure, they have been on the back foot because of lack of investment in health infrastructure. We are meant to talk about how fantastic the health infrastructure is.
In the past fortnight alone we have learnt more about the government’s knowledge since 2009 of the fire risk to the women and children’s hospital due to the cladding and the fact that more and more Canberrans arriving in emergency have to wait in hallways on trollies to be seen because there is not enough room. We have had the HIAC report released recently that the government tried to hide from the people of
Canberra. It detailed some 143 high risks associated with ageing infrastructure assets across the hospital and four extreme risks, with serious concerns about the hospital’s main switchboard and ageing helipad.
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