Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker Lindsay, I look forward to your response in due course to my remarks. I want to take this opportunity to update the House on a regrettable example of government arrogance. In this case, I want to refer to the proposal by the Commonwealth to dispose of Department of Defence land known as Jezzine Barracks/Kissing Point, an area with important historical and heritage values at the western end of Townsville’s Strand.

The Townsville City Council, led by the mayor, Councillor Tony Mooney, has established a community alliance to save the site. This alliance includes the local RSL, members of the National Trust and many historical and museum associations. They have already gained the support of thousands of local people, through petitions and displays around the community, to retain the whole site in public hands to allow the community full access to this magnificent piece of Townsville.

Unfortunately, the Department of Defence, through its Future Options Study for Jezzine Barracks including Kissing Point, has sought to ignore the community’s clearly stated demand to preserve the whole of Kissing Point and Jezzine Barracks for the community. What is worse, it has attempted to cover this up by misrepresenting the community’s views on this vital issue. On 24 November 2005, Olga Strachan, Assistant Director, Property Disposal Task Force, stated on Townsville local radio, immediately after the release of the government’s preferred options for the site:

Well we’ve had some feedback through the email on the hotline and the telephone hotline ... but we haven’t had a lot to date ... we haven’t had a great deal of response. We’re hoping that people are waiting to see what the options are ... and then come in and actually talk to us about them and then make some comments back.

The member for Herbert directly contradicted these comments in a media release. In his statement of 19 January 2006, he said:

The reference group received more than 2000 submissions and they were considered in detail—they then released the preferred options.

The question is: who is telling the truth here—the public servant who says there were hardly any comments or the member for Herbert who says they were inundated with feedback?

The Townsville City Council has asked for copies of all public submissions made to the future options study. This request was bluntly refused, despite the council being happy to hand over its own detailed submission when the member for Herbert requested it. The issue is: what has the government got to hide on this issue? Not only has the government shut up shop on its public consultation; one of the lines it has consistently run is that the housing it will build on the site will be used to house Defence personnel. On 21 November, the member for Herbert stated:

The balance of the land stays in the ownership of Defence and it’ll be used for Defence purposes, that is housing for our soldiers and the men and women of the ADF.

However, in an embarrassing revelation the government has now admitted in a public newsletter, released in the last week, that there will be privately tenanted residences in the housing estate at Kissing Point.

The local council, through its own exhaustive public consultation, knows that the public does not support the government’s plans for Kissing Point and Jezzine Barracks, and it is regrettable that we are not getting this support coming through from the member for Herbert. It is important that the member for Herbert represents his local community rather than repeatedly choosing to push the Canberra line, to the detriment of his local community. I urge the member for Herbert to have the courage to take on the senior bureaucrats in the Department of Defence and his political masters in Canberra rather than to lie down and allow a huge part of Kissing Point and Jezzine Barracks to be lost as a housing estate.