The chairman is angrrrryyy!

Incidently, if the Government doesn’t like the NCA’s response to the budget cuts, can’t it just direct them or legislate to retain the services they want? The head of the NCA doesn’t seem to be doing the organisation any services by whinging loudly and cutting the only things about the NCA people like.

I reckon the NCA burnt a lot of goodwill with Canberrans over the GDE re-routing debacle.

Cutting the NCAs budget = ripping the guts out of Canberra? Wow. My apologies, I didn’t realise.

Was it SGS?

Yes, weeks to rip the guts out of Canberra and more will surely follow – just wait for the budget. And, yeah, I have a poliical agenda and it’s called supporting Canberra. My clear agenda, as you put it, included putting the boot into the ACT Liberals in this room last week. But, justbands, please keep on defending Rudd and the ALP as long as you like.

That’s a reasonable position justbands. I heard som uninformed dipshit on 2CC this morning going on about why haddn’t the government done anything, why hadn’t the stared implementing all their policies etc. Of course it wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that Parliament hasn’t even sat yet would it now?

Actually, I have no political agenda Crikey (although you’ve made youre very clear). Personally, I think they’re all a mob of pricks. It’s just that we had over a decade of Howard & his mates. Yes, some things they got right…doesn’t mean we ignore their problems though. Rudd has had only weeks, I’m willing to give him a chance before tarring him with the same brush.

Gazza has been rather quiet on this matter.

If you are talking about the national surplus….why not mention the record takings from business tax across all sectors and across all states and the record income tax collected due to near record low unemployment….but of course, that line of debate does not suit your political agenda.

Re the design plans for Constitution Ave. I’ve seen dog spew that made more sense. Widening the road to improve traffic flow I understand, giving one of those lanes over to street cafe parking I don’t. All that expected extra traffic trying to move through something that resembles Franklin St. Me I’m happy it’s not happening.

You were talking about national surplus, who mentioned Canberra?

Yes, indeed justbands, Canberra has been booming for many years because of our local “mining boom” LOL….coal out of Narrabundah, open cut mining of iron ore at Red Hill, oil drilling in the Eastlake wet lands, gold digging in Glebe Park and best of all for our mining boom has been the gas coming out of Labor head quarters in Barton.

Garbage. No lies, just a strong economy, which the new government has inherited, and has a responsibility not to fuck up.

And that was Labor’s debt the previous government inherited.

Crikey Crikey….how long have you been a member of the Libs for? We have a large surplus & little debt thanks to a HUGE mining boom. We have high inflation & high interest rates thanks to Howard & the lies he sold the nation at the previous election.

They’re more accountable than the NCA. We can just vote them out.

They’ve known about this for ages. There were five jobs (aps4 – el2)with the NCA on apsjobs.gov.au (formerly the Gazette) mid last year. since November they have been listed as ‘to be readvertised in ’08’.

I believe it was one of Labor’s election promises, that they would dump the NCA, so they’ve had plenty of time to find new work and they’ve wasted enough time justifying thier own positions.

I have come across the NCA before – they were dressed in black turtle-necks – ’nuff said. I had the feeling they thought they were Parisian civil architects protecting Griffin Legacy building the greatest city ever – which, admit it, is never going to happen.

Stanhope and Lundy are so piss-weak over Rudd’s (Labor’s) cuts for Canberra.

Imagine the screams of anger and disgust from Stanhope, Lundy and co if the Liberals had made such cuts.

People like to say that Howard did the same but they fail to note that when Howard made his cuts the nation had a big deficit and was it debt NOW the nation has a large surplus and no national debt – thanks to Howard and his team.

Labor have a record of screwing Canberra and the sheep here to continue to vote for them.

I’ll ask him if I see him this weekend. I have a nasty habit of spotting Jon on his weekend outings, shortly afterwards, Mrs Mælinar has a nasty habit of prodding my ribs and whispering ‘shhh he’ll hear you’, or similar effect words.

It’s nothing unique to Kevin Thumper…Little Johnny did the exact same thing when he first came to power. In fact, it’s perfectly normal for an incoming Goverment to do this. They have different priorities, different initiatives, different objectives. Some Departments will be cut (& usually rightly so) & others will grow. Some entire sections will go & others will start up. When Kevin & his mates have had their turn & the Libs come back in…guess what? They’ll do exactly the same thing.

What are the NCA doing with an engineer, planner, architect?

Prime services for consultancies. Plenty of those around.

Empire building to the extreme.

If the number of SES staff is an indentifyer of bloated-ness take a look at the crowd that draft legislation for the Commonwealth – an entry level position with the Office of Parliamentary Counsel is SES Band 1!

As far as planning goes I’d rather a hoard of SES making decisions than the incompetent dolts that get a gurnsey with the ACT Government.

If there’s duplication, it’s because StanDope has set up shadow departments to run interference.

Couldn’t we put Jess the Hurdling turtle in charge of the SES?

To suggest not paying senior managers who are senior professional people with highly specialised technical skills at SES level is ridiculous. Planners are in short supply right around the country, and engineers get paid a motza in the private sector. The more junior professional staff are at different junior levels and get paid less, obviously.

I defy you to identify any government department or agency with a requirement for that kind of particular technical expertise that isn’t paying salaries like that. The parliamentary departments – the house of reps, and the senate, for example, would employ about 100 staff each, including around 40 attendants (who are paid less), while each have 7 SES, each of whom have very specialised technical qualifications. I don’t hear anyone calling the federal parliament bloated and calling for heads to roll.

The suggestion that the NCA is top heavy is nonsense.

Um,

What do the other 78 do, (as they are apparently not architects, engineers or planners), other than stir the ACT gov?

And far too much bloat. Five is excessive.

Well, we got fucking monkeys anyway, didn’t we?

Do I think its acceptable that there should be five SES out of 83? One architect, one engineer, one planner, two others ..

Erm, yes ..

What do you want? To pay peanuts and have monkeys?

Five SES staff out of 83? And you think this is acceptable?

Ridiculous.

The winter in the capital tent event was awful. But we would have given it another go. The execution was bad, but the idea was good.

What was GREAT were the night markets. We took the kids, plus friends visiting from interstate, twice. I can’t think of another similar event in winter in Canberra that really got people into the big spaces round the parliamentary area. The view across the lake was amazing. It was a great night out, not only for Canberra families but also to show visitors was a great place it is here. What a shame its gone.

Most Canberra national institutions like Screensound, Questacon, the National Archives etc would have more than 83 staff and operate with either one or none SES level staff.

In what sense is a Commonwealth government agency with (formerly) 83 staff headed up by five SES in the senior management team bloated? The ACT gov’s LDA has around that number, as does ACTPLA.

Bringing up ACTPLA as a comparison is asking what’s worse for you, a big mac or a double whopper. They’re both as bloated as a beached whale and twice as useless. But that doesn’t take away from what’s wrong with the NCA…

eph,
You are drawing a long bow to include the motorists on this road.
Suggest you visit the ABC site to see what I’m talking about.

NickD – 2 of the people gone from the NCA are SES.

Why on earth does the NCA exist? To look after the national capital. I wouldn’t trust the local government to break their way out of a wet paper bag, let alone look after any more of Canberra than theyre currently responsible. In any event, why should Canberra taxpayers have to foot the bill for the nation’s capital? Canberra local municipal functions, yes, but the parliamentary triangle, the major access roads, no way.

Everyone’s always embarrased about living in Canberra, but it should be a place the nation can be proud of. The feds should care about us and invest financial resources here. It’s a town for federal government and the nation after all.

cranky – you want interested users of Constitution Avenue to fund improvements there. Do the ‘interested users’ include all the public servants and others that drive on that road every day? What do you want, a toll road?

ABC News has had rivers of tears shed by interested parties at the withdrawal of funding for the Constitution Ave upgrade.

If its such a bloody wonderful idea, how about these interested parties fund the thing!

Having said that, I see the cuts to volunteer services add up to an inordinate ammount of money (as detailed higher up the thread), and certainly seem to be targetted at causing the maximum ammount of grief to the locals. Bureaucratic games.

Why on earth does the NCA exist? It seems to duplicate several ACT Govt authorities. Why not contract the ACT Govt to perform the NCA’s handful of unique functions? – surely this would save money and integrating these tasks into a larger agency should help (eg, due to the deeper corporate knowledge, better career structures to retain staff, etc). Any organisation which stages an open-air market, at night, next to the lake, and in winter seems a dubious use of taxpayers’ money.

Incidently, does anyone know if the story in Crikey! claiming that all of the sackings in the NCA have been non-SES staff and the number of SES is remaining unchanged is correct?

In what sense is a Commonwealth government agency with (formerly) 83 staff headed up by five SES in the senior management team bloated? The ACT gov’s LDA has around that number, as does ACTPLA.

Lundy is a disgrace.

If there’s unhappiness with consultation processes a new gov should fix that, not obliterate an entire organisation as some kind of malicious pay back.

The Griffin Legacy was a plan that had vision. Now we have nothing. Where’s the ACT goverments infrastructure plan? Who’s going to fix the bottlenecks on consitution avenue and the ever increasing car parking and road access problems in and around defence?

everyone who called for heads to roll at the NCA should take a good hard look at yourselves and what’s happened to Canberra as a result.

Hasn’t the NCA bloated from 1 SES to 5 in the last few years?

Guess this is what happens when you ask the bloated bureaucracy how it should cut its budget.

I never cease to be amazed at the maggots that come out to apologise for StanDope and his pinko cronies. Take the myth that the NCAs planning responsibility ends at the Parliamentary triangle. There’s a queue of clueless bastards that genuinely don’t understand the simple fact that the NCAs planning roll is legislated and it covers a far wider scope than PT. The simple reality is that Chairman StanDopes bureaucrats have tried to involve themselves in planning issues that are beyond their competence – take the ludicrous idea of rebuilding the burned out forest settlements.

Winter Wonderland.

Australia Day, Live!

Griffin Legacy.

Suffrage monuments.

Al – I agree. The NCA is a bloated joke that seemed to be out to create work for itself. Removal of the clover leaf roads at Flynn Place to have more lights on Commonwealth Avenue – an absolutely moronic idea.

Taking cars off Kind Edward Terrace may sound nice, but it is a major thoroughfare. It took years of lobbying for the roundabout to be put in opposite the gallery – and looking at the works, it looks too small for buses to navigate through safely…

Winter in the Capital? NOBODY ATTENDED COZ IT WAS TOO COLD! See GMC/Canberra 400 – do these morons ever learn any lessons?

Gungahlin Al: EXACTLY! Particularly re: cutting things in a way designed to get gullible people on side with them.

Doesn’t Michael Ball live in Sydney?

I think Kate’s dead right on this on a number of fronts.

The NCA did need severe pruning in the planning area to get them out of stuff that’s outside their balliwick and focused back on the parliamentary triangle.

Instead what we see is this game that some bureaucrats play when they don’t like budget cuts imposed on them – cut the things that hurt those that pushed the cuts most. We saw this sort of behaviour in Canberra a year or so back when TaMS stopped collecting roo roadkill…
Hence all the monetarily insignificant things like volunteer programs…designed to get a lot of gullible people on side with them.

Kate is right to call out this sort of behaviour.

On some of the other “promotions”, the NCA has been building up quite an empire of events that rightly belong under the ACT Gov’t’s umbrella. How often do we Canberra residents with kids have multiple public events competing with each other to choose from? And when they compete, each is degraded due to poorer attendances. Winter in the Capital was a good example.

What is the point of the NCA promoting Canberra to us converted? They should have been taking Canberra to the cities and the regions.

The NCA chair may well have been audibly upset by it all on 666 today, but I think he needs to step back and look a bit more objectively at what’s been happening on his watch.

My 2 bob worth.

Ahhhh, Kate Lundy…

You’ve got the wrong end of the sausage S4anta. The $40-odd million was from cutting the whole redevelopment of Constiturion Avenue as per the Griffin Legacy plan. Standopes smirk must be sliping from his face now that major infrastructure developments are getting canned.

One wonders how much expenditure of the $46 million dollar pie the volunteer guided tours must take.

program officer (0.5FTE..maybe)
1 x public liability and professional indemnity for volunteers
Access to facilities that are usually free/gold coin donation

$46.999 million gold plated dummy to spit.

Kate wouldn’t fit under a rock!

She’s another one of these women who should be at home cooking dinner for the Man of the House!

Yeah I heard the NCA chairman on the ABC this morning. he wasn’t really holding back and he pretty well told that slapper Kate Lundy to get back under her rock.

No more bread and circuses.

A possible explanation for the Howard Government allowing such fat into to the NCA is the more bureaucratic and superfluous they became, the more they would create problems for the ACT Government – airport developments etc.