Page 4353 - Week 12 - Thursday, 24 October 2019
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Canberra Hospital—SPIRE project
MR MILLIGAN: My question is to the Minister for Health. Minister, why didn’t you attend the public consultation meeting on SPIRE 2 with Garran residents on 26 September 2019 or send a representative?
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: On the evening of 26 September I was in Sydney, having just met with the New South Wales minister for health in preparing for a meeting the following day.
MR MILLIGAN: Minister, why did you choose not to send a representative to this public meeting?
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: I thank Mr Milligan for the question. This meeting was an introductory meeting that I understand had been organised by Major Projects Canberra, following a meeting with the Garran Primary School. This was a meeting to introduce the project to the community. As I have said a number of times today, the project is in the early detailed design stage. This meeting was really about introducing the project to the community and introducing the people from the public service who are working on the project.
I said to the community in my letter that was sent yesterday and redirected again this morning that I apologised if community members had felt their concerns had not been addressed to date, and I assured them that it was the intention of all of those representing the ACT government to gather those concerns and work through them. But this was an early community engagement process that had the intention of introducing Major Projects Canberra and introducing the project. Obviously, that meeting did not go as well as we would have hoped, and raised some community concerns.
I have said—and I am on the record in a speech that I gave to the Property Council last year in my role as Minister for Urban Renewal—that I believe all developers should be good neighbours. That includes the ACT government. I am absolutely committed, as I am across all of my portfolios, to ensuring that our community engagement is positive and that community members are listened to.
MR HANSON: Minister, will any of the consultation actually make any difference to your plans for emergency vehicle access to SPIRE 2? If so, how?
MS STEPHEN-SMITH: I thank Mr Hanson for the supplementary question. Of course I do not want to pre-empt the outcome of those consultations. But, yes, of course they will. That is the purpose of consulting with the community, to understand everybody’s concerns, to understand all of the implications. As I have said multiple times, while a lot of work has gone into the project and we have made substantial progress in developing this largest investment in health infrastructure in the history of ACT government to date, it is still in the early stages of detailed design.
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