Question Without Notice No. 591 asked in the Legislative Council on 12 September 2017 by Hon Colin De Grussa
Parliament: 40 Session: 1
SHIRE OF ESPERANCE — TANKER JETTY REPAIRS — FUNDING
591. Hon COLIN de GRUSSA to the Minister for Regional Development:
I refer to reports on ABC Goldfields–Esperance radio this morning that the Minister for Regional Development has contacted the Shire of Esperance and advised that it may be able to use some of the money allocated for the Esperance indoor sports stadium for the tanker jetty repairs.
(1) Has the minister contacted the Shire of Esperance and made such an offer?
(2) Has the minister started asking the community to trade funding allocated for the sports stadium for the jetty instead?
(3) Does the minister consider this to be standard practice and will she offer other local governments the opportunity to trade funding for projects that they may want to complete?
Hon ALANNAH MacTIERNAN replied:
(1)–(3) I thank the member for the question. Yes, I did ring Victoria Brown this morning. She is a person I think very highly of. I recognised the risks associated with the collapsed jetty and basically started exploring options. Of course, this is a facility in transport, but I am just looking at how we might deal with this. Obviously, there is the issue of the conservation order and dealing with the immediate emergency and whether there was an appetite in a very constrained environment to look at perhaps delaying one set of funding and seeing whether we could move that funding around. Shire President Brown made it very clear that she saw the recreation centre as something that was really a very great service to the community and was needed fairly readily, but we agreed that Ministers Rita Saffioti and David Templeman and I would continue to have dialogue about how we manage this issue for the people of Esperance.