Joel Fitzgibbon (Hunter, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

It is becoming a bit exhausting, but I rise to highlight yet another broken promise by the Abbott government. I have just come from the chamber, where I spoke to a very good motion submitted by the member for Shortland, who is with us this morning, about the government's clear broken promise on Landcare funding—a $480 million cut to a group of volunteers. This one is not quite so transparent as that, nor the Prime Minister's election eve pledge not to cut health funding, not to cut education funding, not to cut pensions and, of course, not to raise any new taxes.

This broken promise is done more by omission, because in August last year I announced that Maitland City Council would receive some $186,340 to deal with antisocial behaviour both in the CBD of Maitland and around the Rutherford shopping centre. This was a well-considered, fully funded program recommended by the Attorney-General's Department—not just plucked out of the air by the then Labor government on the eve of an election but properly considered and recommended by the Attorney-General's Department and fully funded in the 2013-14 budget. How dare Justice Minister Keenan, having revoked the funding, so arrogantly tell the Maitland community that I had had six years to fund this program and if I were serious I would have done it then.

There are a couple of points. One is that this issue was not on the radar for six years. The antisocial behaviour has grown and Maitland council acted—I have not been able to check the records this morning but some time, I suspect, in 2013—by making an application to the then government, an application we duly considered and promptly responded to with more than $180,000.

How dare Minister Keenan so arrogantly respond to the real needs of the Maitland community with such a dismissive remark. I will tell the justice minister what he can do. He can apologise to the Maitland community. He can restore the funding to the Maitland community and, in doing so, address a very real concern, a very real problem, in the Maitland community—one that the Maitland council is trying so hard to address but which it needs support to address through the provision of CCTV cameras in the Maitland CBD, around the railway station and, as I said, in the shopping centre in Rutherford.

See this speech in context