I understand the importance of the City of Sydney getting on with providing Childcare facilities but I’m less sure whether it should be in our parks.

Already in this Council meeting, we’re proposing to build a farm in Sydney Park, move the child cycle park and now to build a child care centre in two parks. You take 1% here and 1% there and before you know it, the place becomes overgrown with government buildings.

I said last week, that Dan Murphy’s seems to have little trouble finding big sites in our LGA.

We spoke last week in Committees, that we don’t know what childcare will look like in the future and whether we need a small number of bigger sites or a big number of smaller sites.

I don’t buy the argument that we need to own the land. That’s very old-fashioned thinking. We give our tenants a lot of certainly and long term leases. We should consider leasing premises and it would give us lots of flexibility.

That’s why I’m not supporting this item.