Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the last week of the election campaign, the coalition government made an announcement that funding would be granted to the Darwin City Council from the Safer Communities Fund for five new CCTV cameras and that those cameras would be managed and monitored by the police. However, now we are hearing that the coalition government has backflipped from this funding announcement and wants the Darwin City Council to make an application for the funding.

To Territorians, this sounds familiar. The same process is happening with our cancer scanner, which was promised by the current foreign minister six years ago. We know what these processes and applications are. They are code for 'delay' and 'not fair dinkum'. We have heard from the Darwin City Council that they are no longer interested in receiving the money because it is completely insufficient to meet the ongoing maintenance, monitoring and management costs, as well as the fact that they need to go through a new grant process that does not even exist yet. It is yet another example of the coalition's complete failure to stand by commitments made during the election campaign. That is why Territory Labor is moving ahead with funding for our PET scanner infrastructure—we cannot depend on the Commonwealth. I fought for an extra $40 million for the Palmerston Regional Hospital because there were more games being played there. The coalition are big on games and rhetoric but low when it comes to delivery.