Page 5002 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 28 November 2018
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that once a place or a thing is named something, that tends to be what people call it until the end of time. Sometimes meddling with place names at this official level does nothing in regard to what we actually call places.
As I said earlier, this motion, when it was initially flagged, was much more extensive than in its current form. Ms Cody was calling for an extensive review of pretty much every place name in the ACT. I am pleased to see that she has backed away from that, after receiving a lot of public advice, some of it from Jeff Brown from the ACT Place Names Committee, who noted that there were 6,000 or 7,000 place names in the ACT, and wondered how much time and money it would take to review all of them.
The motion does, however, specifically call for a review of the name “Haig Park”. I know that Ms Cody received correspondence from Sydney lawyer Terry Dwyer about Field Marshal Haig. He said:
May I suggest you read a detailed military history of 1918? Field Marshal Haig was the only Allied commander who thought that victory was possible in 1918. Everyone else expected the war to continue to 1919. I am more than well aware that Field Marshal Haig’s tactics have been well criticised and competently so, but by people in a position to judge and people who would be the first to acknowledge that the British commanders of World War I were facing a war unlike any other they had experienced, and we must remember that Haig had the job of building a mass army from scratch to match the German army.
Terry goes on to say in his correspondence:
You and your fellow elected members are not being paid to be armchair Generals or to be social justice warriors or social commentators … You are being paid to govern a Territory on behalf of the Crown …
As a constituent, I would be very grateful if you could turn your mind to doing so and, if you can do it competently, you will earn my respect and I will not think that your election is a case of the community paying you in order to be deprived of a hairdresser who provided a useful service.
This is Canberra, Madam Deputy Speaker. This is the home of the suburban lobby group. They are springing up left, right and centre. They are all over town. They are opposing all manner of things, from apartment blocks to drones and public housing developments. The suburbs are full of retired public servants with plenty of skills and plenty of time on their hands. If there are cases of place names that are causing genuine hurt for groups of people, these people, by and large, are more than able to launch their own campaigns to move towards changing those names. I note that some of those campaigns have been going on for some time.
If Ms Cody has knowledge of other specific place names that are causing hurt to people, as an MLA, or indeed just as a member of the public, she has the means to bring this to the attention of place names and to get the powers-that-be to examine such hurt. I am sure that the Place Names Committee would then consider the level of hurt caused by such names and consider whether or not to go down a path of potentially changing the name.
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