Mr ALISTER HENSKENS (Wahroonga) (20:27): I will never apologise for standing up for my community. That is why I stood for Parliament, and it is what I will do while I remain here. Last week I spoke in Parliament about project cost overruns of more than $33 million by Ku-ring-gai Council. Without naming the people involved then—but I will now—I said that long-serving councillors, who include Christine Kay, Cedric  Spencer and Jeff Pettett, should explain to the community their oversight and role in these council debacles. But instead of dealing with the substance of overruns on council initiated and managed projects, Christine Kay and Cedric Spencer made false claims last week in The Sydney Morning Herald.

This was a transparent attempt to play the man rather than the ball and to deflect from dealing with these important issues. Christine Kay told The Sydney Morning Herald that "she was disappointed that a local State MP had chosen to undermine the carefully considered decisions of the elected council regarding major community projects". If Christine Kay thinks that these council overruns of $33 million involved "carefully considered decisions of the elected council", then we would all like to see what Christine Kay thinks a bad decision looks like.

As a consequence of these decisions, the council has now obtained approval from the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal for rates to increase by 29 per cent, in part because of a $13.5 million loan to fund the $16 million overrun on the St Ives High School project. In February 2022 Christine Kay communicated to me that she was unhappy with council's delay of the Norman Griffiths project. Typical of the dysfunction with council, the project is incomplete more than four years later. If the Norman Griffiths Oval project, in the opinion of Christine Kay, had been taking too long to progress four years ago, then why did Christine Kay second a resolution of council, and use her mayor's casting vote just a few weeks ago, to delay the project even further? This was supported by Cedric Spencer and Geoff Pettett. How were Spencer and Pettett even allowed to vote in the council meeting when both had previously declared that they had a conflict of interest on the project?

Do those councillors not realise that delay on infrastructure projects always adds cost to the ratepayers? I believe that the reason Christine Kay has delayed the Norman Griffiths project recently is because she needs the votes of councillors opposed to the project to be re-elected as mayor later this year. The dysfunction of Ku-ring-gai Council does not stop there. It is alleged by one councillor that Cedric Spencer in November 2024 threatened to kill him. That alleged threat is the subject of a criminal hearing in August of this year. But for almost all this term of the council, the councillor who was alleged to have received the threat, and the councillor who made the threat, Cedric Spencer, have been sitting in council meetings and attending some community events together. How is that a normal workplace situation? No wonder council is not focused on what it should be: the public interest.

Finally, if that is not enough, Cedric Spencer managed to lie to the journalists fromThe Sydney Morning Herald last week by saying that I have put a tremendous amount of pressure on him. Other than at community events where council matters are rarely discussed, I have virtually had no communications, including about council matters with any Ku-ring-gai councillor since 2022. That is because I had formed the view that many of the councillors only listened to council staff rather than the community, including me, and that it is therefore futile to spend much time giving them my point of view.

My phone and other records show I had no communications with Spencer in 2022 after 11 January, no communication in 2023, and one communication before he texted a threat to me in October 2024, after which I have had no communication with him. I do not know how I could be putting pressure on Spencer or anyone else without communicating with them for years about council matters. This is the sort of lies and dysfunction that our community has unfortunately come to expect from some of its elected representatives on Ku-ring-gai Council. The community wants the council to do its job. Ku-ring-gai Council needs to explain why it has delivered infrastructure projects so badly in the past, and how they are going to do better in the future, including with Norman Griffiths Oval.