Page 3004 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 5 December 1989
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further bruised in this Assembly. And that is when you wrote out that motion. That is the background of it. So do not come up here with spurious arguments. It is an entirely inadequate basis.
Still, numbers will count. We face reality. Today it seems that this motion is to go through and we are to have a Liberal coalition, after all the hard work has been done. Rosemary Follett has described that and my colleagues will add to it. After all the hard work, we will knock off - perhaps today, perhaps in a couple of days - and you will not have to front up here for another two months.
Will you be able to show the surety of government that the Follett Government has, the confidence and the knowledge of what you are doing? To date it seems to me that your proposals are rather ill-founded. Can you establish a direction for government, as the Follett Government has? Will you be pulling in three different directions or maybe more than that? Can you provide stability? Mr Mackerras thinks you can, although he does say that it is a discredited government before you start. Will you have the competence? I will not comment individually, I have no worries about that, but collectively, as political parties you have not shown any of the competence that I think a government needs, as I found when I looked at your policies.
Finally, in the matters in which I think a government ought to be able to show it, can you demonstrate integrity? I will not question that of people, other than to single out one instance which to me has been an overriding influence, a detrimental influence, in this Assembly in the six and a half months we have been here. My concerns are based on the requirement that our actions here must be honourable, respectful of parliament and entirely decent. I made some reference to that in the speech I made on the first day of this parliament. I am directing a question specifically to Mr Collaery, because integrity in government is an overriding factor of the greatest importance.
Mr Collaery, if you want to take over as Deputy Chief Minister today with honour and credibility, will you today rectify a grievous mistake that you made some months ago? Mr Collaery now knows with certainty, if he did not know then, that allegations he made about Mr Whalan were entirely without foundation. They were grievous allegations, disgraceful allegations. It was done in similar circumstances to those I described on that recent Thursday when Mr Collaery, because of pressures he had generated and could not handle, came rushing into the Assembly and acted impulsively and improperly.
If Mr Collaery is to take this most responsible position, he should accept the standard of the behaviour it requires. In the interests of his integrity and the integrity of this chamber, he should withdraw those allegations and apologise, knowing as he does that they are untrue. We
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