Page 2984 - Week 10 - Friday, 8 October 2021
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One of my first forays in political activism was fighting for the right of this Assembly to legislate on marriage equality which, as we have seen previously, the federal government did away with when it suited their political motivations. So this is not just about voluntary assisted dying. This has happened before when the ACT’s duly elected legislator had been run completely roughshod over. As long as these federal legislations stay in place—if it is not voluntary assisted dying, it will be another thing or another thing after that—this duly elected legislator is slapped in the face by the federal government and told, “Your elections don’t matter, your parliament doesn’t matter, the people you represent don’t matter. What matters is the political point that we can score off, ripping away from you a piece of legislation that you have duly sought to implement.”
What I find particularly frustrating though is the role of Canberra’s Senator Seselja in this debate. A lot has been made of Senator McMahon’s bill. I commend Senator McMahon for bringing forward her bill. A country Liberal senator, I commend her. And I commend her because she is representing her constituents above party politics. I think that is the first obligation on every single one of us in this place and every similar place right across the country.
I imagine she has probably ruffled a few feathers in her federal party room. It is very obvious she has ruffled Senator Seselja’s feathers by bringing forward this legislation. I commend her for doing that because sometimes change is tough and sometimes you lose friends. Sometimes you have to sit across a boardroom table from people that you have had some terse words with. So I commend her for doing that.
What I find so galling—the nerve, the audacity, the gall and the gumption—is that this push at the federal parliament to continue to diminish the territory’s right to govern itself is being advanced by a man who tried to tell the people of the Australian Capital Territory in recent memory that he was ready to serve in the top job as Chief Minister. Can you imagine how confounding that is for the average Canberran, that somebody who wanted to be in charge of the government, run the city, take on the ultimate responsibility of lord mayor, chief minister, premier—all combined—of our 450,000-odd people years later is now an active aggressor within federal parliament against the rights of this Assembly to do its job? I just find that absolutely confounding, deeply hypocritical and shocking.
It would not surprise you, Madam Speaker, that I would leap to my feet and say, “Of course, Canberrans should go out there and vote for Dr Tjanara Goreng Goreng and put a Greens senator in the federal parliament.” Of course that would be what you would expect me to do. But removing the partisanship of it, I just encourage Canberrans to look right across their Senate ballot paper and find a candidate who will stick up for Canberra. There has got to be half a dozen of them and none of them are Senator Seselja, which is frustrating because Senator Seselja has made a point of sticking his nose in the Assembly’s affairs since leaving and becoming a senator. Oh my word!
Madam Speaker, as you know, I sit as one of the three members of the Select Committee inquiring into the Drugs of Dependence Bill, a territory bill which the
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