Page 660 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 21 March 1990
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of interjection and his frequent spurious and self-justifying points of order.
Contempt is shown for this Assembly. We were told that there would be no sitting last night because two Ministers - I think they were pretending Ministers - had something else to go to. That is similar to the contempt that we see with the dorothy dix questions from Executive Deputies about their own areas of responsibility. Everybody knows that Dr Kinloch, as the deputy responsible for education and the arts, has full access to the resources of the Government. So why does this Government waste everybody's time with dorothy dix questions from Dr Kinloch to Mr Humphries?
Any reasonable observer would agree that the Government's refusal to face question time on two sitting days last year and its various attempts to stifle debate ever since are an outrage. The record is quite clear. In our first 100 days in office there were 16 sitting days; the Alliance Government has had nine. We faced 15 question times, but it has allowed only six.
All around Canberra people are wondering what on earth this Government is doing, and the jokes are frequent. They say that this is the summer Government; the Government is on holiday; it is having a long Christmas or it is perpetually out to lunch. It is a lazy government, a government in hiding, but that is no wonder, given the sort of reception that its members get when they come out in public.
The incompetence and the inability to govern is nowhere better demonstrated than in the legislation introduced to this Assembly, such as it has been. When Mr Collaery spoke on the no-confidence motion, just over 100 days ago, he criticised Labor's performance in introducing legislation. He spoke of "a great harvest of legislation" which he claimed I had been preventing. I ask Mr Collaery through you, Mr Speaker: where is that great harvest of legislation? If this is the yardstick, Mr Collaery, why is it that in 100 days, in which we introduced 13 Bills, your Government has introduced only six Bills? Why is it that every one of the six Bills that has been introduced under this Government was already in the pipeline under the Labor Government? Where is the great harvest of legislation, Mr Collaery? Where is the anti-discrimination legislation which you said in January would be ready in only a couple of weeks? Where is the remainder of the planning, environment and leasing legislation which members opposite thought was so important?
On the very rare occasions on which the Government introduces Bills, like the Clinical Waste Bill, it gets it all wrong. Mr Collaery is the self-proclaimed senior lawyer in the Assembly; he is the one with all the other lawyers on his side; he is the one who said that the Labor team needed lawyers. But Mr Collaery could not legislate his way out of a wet paper bag. The Clinical Waste Bill
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