Page 2481 - Week 07 - Monday, 15 August 2022
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if you are the purists that you say you are and you are not just one of the old parties—resign. If the Greens cannot stomach it, if they cannot stomach their own government, they cannot stomach their own budget, resign.
The way it works then is that, if they are not prepared to resign, then the Chief Minister’s job is to sack them. The Chief Minister’s job is to say, “If you are not prepared to adhere to cabinet solidarity, to achieve what we have all put together to achieve for the people of the ACT, then you must be sacked.”
Can you imagine Mr Stanhope, back in his day, putting up with this? Not a chance! Not a chance. He would not have put up with this. He would have made sure that this did not happen. As would have ministers before him, and as would, the premiers across all the other states—and the Prime Minister! Can you imagine the Prime Minister putting up with this? You know, the Greens hobbling together and voting against his own budget. It would not have happened.
The Queensland Parliament fact sheet says:
Such solidarity of Cabinet portrays a sense of strength and stability of the Government to the electorate.
So what does this situation do today? What is going to happen? If cabinet solidarity portrays a sense of strength and stability, what you have arising from this situation is a sense of weakness and instability, coming from the actions of the minister. That is untenable; it is simply untenable.
Madam Speaker, we members are in the process, all of us, of striving for state’s rights. There is going to be a debate in the senate shortly where they are looking at the ACT, saying, “Yes, we want to give them state’s rights on issues,” we all support that. But what is happening here over this budget is the sort of voting that happens in a town council! You have to make a decision. Are we like a state? Are we going to behave like a state? With rights come responsibilities. Are you going to be a responsible government? Are you going to behave like a state government? Or are you going to say, “No, no, no, we want state’s rights over here but when it comes to power sharing agreements and getting what we want, we are going to vote and behave like a town council”? You cannot have it both ways. You cannot have it both ways, as Mr Stanhope said back when the Labor Party used to stand for something.
I support Ms Lee’s motion. It is an important one. It is a matter of principle. It is a matter of making sure that we behave as a parliament the way that we should and that you behave as an executive the way that you should.
Simply saying “We are going to choose to vote on this but not on that because there is a constituency over there that we want to appeal to,” is not the way any parliament works. Not federally. Not in Queensland. Not in Victoria. Not in New South Wales—it seems only in the ACT!
I do not have confidence in this Chief Minister. There are two courses of action available: either the Greens resign from Cabinet or the Chief Minister sacks them.
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