Page 3238 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 21 August 2019
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about the high demand for the Theo Notaras Multicultural Centre and its incapacity to meet that demand. I also asked Ms Stephen-Smith the following: “What plans have been discussed to guarantee that the ACT’s growing multicultural communities will have access to suitable, affordable venues in the future?” You can understand how much it satisfied me to see this Assembly note the very worries that I raised with this government 2½ years ago.
The minister’s response to my question, by the way, was not very satisfying. She said, that the government’s solution was “encouraging culturally and linguistically diverse communities to utilise existing community facilities and other suitable government infrastructure across the ACT for cultural events”. In other words, this government had no plan whatsoever to deal with the future needs of a rapidly growing multicultural population to ensure that, in Mr Gupta’s and Ms Orr’s own words, the community has access to essential facilities.
The solution was to encourage the use of existing facilities, despite nearly everyone knowing that existing facilities had already been outgrown and the situation was worsening. It appears that just 2½ years ago the Labor-Greens government had no idea that their own backbench would be calling on them to note that existing venues cannot meet the requirements of Canberra’s vibrant multicultural communities. This situation highlights an incapacity or an unwillingness to look forward and plan accordingly, possibly both. It is, to be blunt, not what good governments do.
But it is what this government does, so we have arrived where we are today, with a motion pointing out that we have venues of limited capacity amidst increasing demand, something that should not have caught those opposite by surprise.
In 2017, we were told at estimates hearings that the government was receiving “increasing requests for facilities” from multicultural groups that could not be met. In November of that same year, the minister replied to a question that I put on the notice paper by confirming that multicultural groups were being denied meeting space bookings due to room unavailability. Still nothing was done. There was no planning, no exploring and no feasibility studies, as requested in this motion.
I should point out here that when the minister said that the Labor-Greens government’s best plan for a growing multicultural population was to tell community groups to keep using existing structures, it came with a promise. The ACT multicultural framework released in 2015 included action plans for the next three years. One of these to be accomplished in 2016-17 was “an online community coordinated venue booking system” to assist “culturally and linguistically diverse communities to utilise existing community facilities”. When I asked the minister what plans the government had to meet known future needs of culturally and linguistically diverse residents, she repeated this promise: people were, she assured me, “working across government to implement this Action”. Nevertheless, like most of the actions in the framework, this promised booking system was never delivered. And I note that when the framework was updated just three months ago, under the direction of Minister Steel, the second action plan included no mention whatsoever of providing access to suitable venues.
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