Page 2319 - Week 08 - Thursday, 7 June 1990
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MR SPEAKER: Order! You are in a position to suspend standing orders, Mr Moore. Please proceed.
MR MOORE: Mr Speaker, what we have here is a blatant attempt by the Government to remove all private members' business from the notice paper for this afternoon. This part was done without consultation. On the previous occasion I had attempted to compromise with a suggestion of 15 minutes, but at the end of Mr Berry's motion that was overridden roughshod so that we have lost both question time and now this matter of public importance.
Personally I do not intend to speak on the matter of public importance, but I think it is quite appropriate that Mr Stevenson be entitled to raise that issue. If no other members want to speak on it, that is their prerogative, but the reality of the situation is that this is blatantly overriding private members' business.
We have a situation in which Mr Collaery has to catch a plane. Fine; let him go and catch his plane. The Government still has the numbers; it still has the power in the house. I think the house can survive without Mr Collaery without any difficulty at all. There have been suggestions on previous occasions that we should have a pairing arrangement. That has been resisted in this house, and we do not have it. But the reality of the situation is that, if Mr Collaery wishes to leave, we can survive quite nicely without him - as indeed we survived for quite some time without Dr Kinloch, even though we probably needed a little more of his insistence on standing order 61 at the time!
I point out that a serious matter of public importance has been raised about the Belconnen Remand Centre, and I would be interested to know the problems and some of the solutions that have been proposed. I think it is significant that Mr Stevenson has raised it through the normal procedures. We have known about it all day and if the Government did not want to sit any later tonight then its members should not have spoken on the earlier motion although, obviously, Mr Kaine himself and Mr Collaery had to speak. The option for Government members is that they sit later. I have no problem with sitting later. I can stay as long as the Assembly likes.
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