Page 1045 - Week 06 - Thursday, 27 July 1989
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Mr Moore: Rubbish; that was not a single platform.
MR HUMPHRIES: Well, all right, you were not even expressly opposed to a casino. The fact is that, if you take that view, then there were no people elected to this Assembly expressly opposed to a casino, if that is what you want. The fact is that there are nine who were elected on that platform. You have had your referendum. Your referendum was the last election. You cannot ask for another one. I do not accept that the Residents Rally, with a primary vote of less than 10 per cent of all voters in this Territory, has the right to say that the issue has not been resolved, that the electorate needs another chance. The electorate had the opportunity at the last election, with all the other issues put before it, to vote on this issue, and it did.
Mr Moore referred to the committee's report conveniently being in line with Liberal Party policy. I remind him that there was a three-two majority on that committee in favour of the casino and, if he believes that there were some political starting points in some of the parties that they did not deviate from, I would point out that was probably the case very much so for the Residents Rally.
In the course of all our discussions on that committee, one of the issues I wanted to raise all the time was an issue that the Residents Rally has been concerned about for a long time, and that is the symbolism of having a casino on the slopes of City Hill. That is an issue that the Rally has long campaigned about, and I asked witness after witness after witness about that very issue.
The fact is that, of all the witnesses we spoke to, only one felt strongly that, if there were going to be a casino, it should not be on the slopes of City Hill. As I recall, that witness was Dr Kinloch himself. It was not an issue, and yet the position of the Residents Rally member of that committee at the end of the debate was that some cognisance should be taken of the fact that we should not have a casino on the slopes of City Hill. Dr Kinloch referred to 86 additional gamblers. I did not say 86 additional gamblers. I said 86 additional excessive gamblers - extreme problem gamblers. That is what the Caldwell committee said, and I think that that has got to be borne in mind.
This is a hurried report in one sense, but it could have been a lot slower had it not been for the fact that we were traversing the ground that had been traversed by many people before us. We were not raising these issues for the first time. We had three previous inquiries by predecessors of ours in previous legislatures and houses of assembly. We had the Caldwell inquiry, which was a comprehensive and good inquiry. I do not believe most of us really believe that that inquiry was badly done. It was well done.
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