Page 749 - Week 03 - Thursday, 22 March 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Mr Collaery: What was disgraceful about the old tenants - - -
MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Collaery, address your question through the chair.
MS FOLLETT: Mr Speaker, I call upon the Minister to resign.
Mr Kaine: She is still on at you to resign.
MS FOLLETT: Mr Collaery and Mr Kaine both laugh at that concept. They obviously regard an attempt to mislead this Assembly as a matter to be taken very lightly, but I repeat it: I call on the Minister to resign, or on the Chief Minister to sack him.
If the Minister is not willing to resign and the Chief Minister has not got the fortitude to sack him, if they are not willing or able to take this action, then I will ensure that every Attorney-General in this country receives a copy of today's Hansard. The ACT's Chief Law Officer, Mr Collaery, has disgraced the ACT, and he has disgraced his own profession, I might add. This is a very serious matter which requires serious action and I think it is an absolute tragedy that the members opposite have chosen to treat it lightly to the point where you, Mr Speaker, have constantly had to stop them from interjecting; where you have, in fact, had to name a Minister for his constant interjections. If those are the standards they think are all right in this Assembly, I have to disagree. They are not good enough for this Assembly and they are certainly not good enough for the people of the ACT.
MR COLLAERY (Deputy Chief Minister) (3.23): Mr Speaker, I am very pleased to speak on this motion because remarkably it coincides with one we were bringing on and I foreshadow a motion shortly to state certain things, not only about the conduct of Mrs Grassby, but also of the Leader of the Opposition and Mr Whalan. That will come on shortly and will, no doubt, interest the public of Canberra.
I have here - and I propose to table it after I speak - a chronological listing of activity concerning the Northbourne Flats. I will deal very simply with the only point of any substance that I felt the Leader of the Opposition made in her bizarre speech - that contained in the words of letter of 8 November 1989, the document to the ACT Housing Trust, proposing a development by Civil & Civic of the site, which appeared during Mrs Grassby's tenure as Minister for Housing.
Ms Follett makes the technical point that the site itself was not mentioned in the letter of 8 November 1989. I can assure the Assembly that in the ultimate discussion I had with Civil & Civic - the only one, when I finally rang Civil & Civic and asked them what was going on - I spoke to
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .