Page 807 - Week 03 - Thursday, 22 March 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MR BERRY: I am absolutely certain that the Federal Firefighters Union will keep management honest, as it has in the past. Indeed, it has found this little fellow out too - I am referring to Mr Duby. The union has a bit of a history of finding people out.
The fact is that this Government has done nothing. You might tell us what you are on about. If you do not want to give us a snippet now, perhaps you will tell us what it is all about later on. Where are the people in this Government who will protect those whose human rights are threatened, those who are discriminated against? They are not over there; they have all disappeared, they are invisible. It is becoming obvious that the greatest threat to the human rights of the residents of Canberra is the Minister himself, Bernard Collaery, and that threat arises from his lack of action, and his whingeing about being found out.
MR HUMPHRIES (Minister for Health, Education and the Arts) (6.30): It is obvious that when it comes to matters of public importance, we are scraping the bottom of the barrel a bit at the moment. I know that we were criticised by the former Government for not using MPIs enough, that somehow we did not employ that particular device sufficiently, but I can see that had we had to scrape the bottom of this sort of barrel we would certainly have been desperate, I can assure you. I would like to think that when we were in opposition we raised matters of real public importance, not phoney matters like - - -
Mrs Grassby: Human rights is not important, Mr Humphries? Is that what you are saying?
MR HUMPHRIES: No, Mrs Grassby, but the failure of the Kaine-Collaery Government to protect human rights for the ACT residents is really just a little bit overblown.
Mrs Grassby: Exactly! That is a typical tory attitude.
MR HUMPHRIES: I can see what is going to happen next week, Mr Speaker. We will have matters like "the child molesting activities of the Kaine-Collaery Government" or "the grave robbing activities of the Kaine-Collaery Government", and so on. That is what we will get to if we keep going down this path.
I have to say something about the Opposition speeches because these have been fairly hilarious for the most part, and I think they deserve some comment. First of all, I refer to a comment made by Ms Follett about Mr Collaery and the Residents Rally being the junior partners in the Liberal Government. That is rather an extraordinary sort of statement, because out of the 10-member Government the Liberal Party has four members. How a party with a minority of members in a government can be the senior partner really escapes me.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .