One cannot help feeling a little like Voltaire when looking at Wayne Berry’s decision to put a hospice on Acton Peninsula.
I disagree with what he is doing, but I will defend (if not to the death at least in print) his right to do it.
It is troubling that the Deputy Prime Minister, Brian Howe, has chimed in on the issue and that Kate Carnell wants the Federal Parliament’s joint committee on the national capital to flick the respirator switch attached to Berry’s plans.
Calling in the Feds is asking for trouble in the future. When the Federal Parliament gave the ACT self-government it gave the ACT Legislative Assembly power to make laws for “”the peace order and good government of the Territory”, with certain exceptions about national land and some other national matters.
The National Capital Planning Authority has concluded that a windswept car park on the western side of the base of Acton Peninsula is hardly national land. If the ACT wants to put up a hospice there, then it should be able to.
Mr Howe, too, has acknowledged there are no national planning difficulties with putting the $3 million hospice there. But he is worried about the flow-on effect. Mr Berry has announced that the hospice will not be the only health facility on the peninsula. As well as a place for the dying, there will be a placed for the aged and perhaps a rehabilitation centre.
Mr Howe has said, “”From an aged care viewpoint, I think it is important that facilities are accessible and they are part of the community.”
That is an eminently sensible approach. It applies to the hospice as much as an aged-care unit. It is plainly silly to have these things stuck on a peninsula far, far from the main hospitals and their pharmaceutical and other services or indeed from any shops or reasonably frequent bus service.
But, quite frankly, it is none of Mr Howe’s business. It is an ACT matter. And if Mr Berry wants to make an asinine decision on behalf of the ACT residents he represents, he should be allowed to get on with it without federal interference.
Ms Carnell’s plea for a federal parliamentary committee to interfere is equally misplaced. The base end of the peninsula is hardly land of national-capital significance, though the tip end, barely a mace’s throw from Parliament House, surely is.
The national planning committee only has power to recommend agaisnt the hospice if its positioning is inconsistent with Canberra’s character as a national capital. Ms Carnell is asking it to interfere because it is economically inefficient and detrimental to dying people to be stuck miles away from the medical help of a major hospital _ the right deed for the wrong reason.
The appeal to the Feds is a sorry admission that we are incapable of governing ourselves or, worse, incapable of relying on ourselves to marshal an opposition.
Instead of inviting the Feds in, opponents of the Berry plan should be drawing people’s attention to the consequences of wasting $3 million building a new hospice when for less than half that it could refurbish existing buildings right next to Calvary Hospital and have a bigger, better, more convenient and less-costly-to-run hospice. It could even refurbish existing buildings on Acton Peninsula.
Independent MLA Helen Szuty did a bit of homework during the week that might help. She dug out the ACT’s forward design program for 1992-93 and compared it with the capital works program for 1993-94. She found, much to the bureaucrats’ consternation (who had hoped it had been forgotten), that several key projects had disappeared. The forward design of 1992-93 did not translate into the bricks and mortar of 1993-94. They included Tuggeranong Indoor Sports Stadium, a neighbourhood centre at Gungahlin, weatherproofing at Belconnen bus interchange, a roundabout at the Cotter Road-McCulloch Street intersection and extensions to the Belconnen fire station.
Could it be that the Tuggeranong sports stadium has been delayed so we can build an inferior hospice?
Speaking of Acton and federal interference, former Chief Minister and Opposition Leader Trevor Kaine asked what he thought was a pertinent question to the chairman of the Grants Commission, Dick Rye, at the Advance Bank Trends lunch a week ago. How come, Kaine asked, the commission was cutting out the transition-to-self-government grants to the ACT when there was a “”pervasive national interference” in the ACT that was on-going? Kaine said indignantly that the ACT could not do the things it wanted on Acton or build the courts building it wanted because of federal interference.
Rye politely pointed out that the transition grants were because of the high standards in health, education and other areas tht the ACT had inherited on self-government and that the ACT needed a reasonable time to adjust, which had now (for most purposes) run out. The national-capital disability, to compensate for things like the inability to hit the Feds for land tax or payroll tax, however, would always be with us and the Grants Commission would always allow for it.
It is pretty esoteric stuff, but surely Kaine (holding the position he does as Opposition spokesman on finance) should have known the difference, or at least had the wit not to display his embarrassing ignorance of the matter in public.