Page 2294 - Week 08 - Thursday, 7 June 1990
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I have no confidence in this Government and, as I said, I cannot vote for Mr Stevenson's motion because I could not vote for anything Mr Stevenson put up, on principle. However, I could support the amendment of Mr Moore, who put it very correctly that this Government is destroying our beautiful city. The sooner it goes the better.
MS FOLLETT (Leader of the Opposition) (3.03): Mr Speaker, this motion proposes that the Assembly has no confidence in Mr Kaine in view of his "lack of integrity, lack of credibility, and extreme hypocrisy". It goes on to mention a particular demonstration of those characteristics in relation to the X-rated video tax. The issues of integrity, credibility and hypocrisy are ones which I believe this Assembly must consider very carefully.
It would be possible to treat this motion of no confidence in Mr Kaine in a directly personal sense and to concentrate solely on an examination of his personal performance, his successes and his failings. In certain situations, it might be appropriate to concentrate solely upon the individual performance of the Chief Minister. But we should recognise that in this Assembly a resolution of no confidence in the Chief Minister is the basis on which a whole government stands or falls. While this motion provides an opportunity to make some comments about the Chief Minister's performance, I believe it is far more important for the opportunity that it provides to review the performance of his Government.
There can be no doubt that the current Chief Minister, personally, and most members of his Government do lack credibility and have demonstrated extreme hypocrisy in view of their passage of the X-rated video tax just six months after they defeated the same proposal in this Assembly. The Chief Minister and his associates have tried to justify their change of heart by saying that the Assembly has now voted to retain the X-rated video industry. The industry was legal in November last year and it is legal now. The Chief Minister said last November that taxing would legitimise the industry, yet he sees no conflict in going against his principles to do so now.
I think that reasonable observers would forgive me and others on this side for expressing a degree of anger at this hypocritical and cowardly behaviour by the Liberal Party and the Residents Rally, who in their usual opportunist manner used this issue as the only excuse they could find to remove my Government. But the X-rated video tax is only the tip of the iceberg. It is really the least important of the many reasons why the Canberra community already has no confidence in this Government and why this Assembly should now join it.
Mr Speaker, I have spoken repeatedly in this Assembly and elsewhere about the need for stability and predictability to allow the local community to adapt to the new conditions
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