Community Alliance Party

Community Alliance Party candidate Jane Tullis has called for the release of the GHD report into the future use of school sites as soon as it is handed to the ACT Government, which was to be sometime in mid-August.

"We are keen to see how well they have represented the community's wishes to retain these public assets in public hands; but we are concerned that it will be another waiting game for the report’s findings to be made public," said Mrs Tullis.

The Community Alliance has already responded to what communities have said, three times now, about the use of their local community facilities.

"Already it is clear that Cook, Tharwa, Flynn and Hall should be re-opened. In most other cases, there is genuine demand to retain the buildings and grounds for public use, and people have expressed many wonderful and innovative ides as to how the flexibility for future use could be maintained" said Mrs Tullis.

According to Mrs Tullis, the Purdon's report from a previous round of consultations about the future use of school sites at least recorded the wishes of the general Canberra community, only then to compromise those with recommendations aimed solely at fulfilling the government’s demand for a fiscal return.

"The Stanhope Government, realising the damaging consequences of that consultation to their re-election bid, then sat on the Purdon's report for five months before releasing it and immediately announcing that we should endure yet another round of consultations that ask the same question," she said.

"There is a view that this latest exercise was designed to test the waters on what the ACT Government thought it could take to the election, making it another taxpayer-funded party- political exercise," she said.

Mrs Tullis said that the Community Alliance Party is all for consultation, but not this approach of wearing down communities through unremitting repetition.

She hopes that the ACT community will never again be ignored and crushed at the whim of an arrogant and self-serving majority government.

Contact: Jane Tullis