Page 2464 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 7 August 1990
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MR BERRY: Your size would be measured by the swelling head, but I do not think it has much to do with the brains inside because you have not recognised the protection that these people need in this community. You have turned your back on them, and they will pay you back.
MR ACTING SPEAKER: I call Mr Humphries.
Mr Berry: It's not about school closures, is it?
MR HUMPHRIES (Minister for Health, Education and the Arts) (8.55): Mr Acting Speaker, I will not be rising to debate school closures. I suspect that members opposite would claim that virtually anything that happened in Canberra, including bad weather, road accidents and the Raiders losing, would be attributable to schools closing, sooner or later. So we will put that in our little notebook, to remember that every time something is raised it is blamed on school closures.
Mr Acting Speaker, I think it is obvious that the Labor Party members again are experiencing the selective amnesia that has afflicted them several times since joining the opposition benches some months ago. That amnesia seems to give them a great sense of their own wisdom and capacity to have spied out the world in a perfect fashion when they were in government, and all these things would have come right if only time had not beaten them. If only they had been permitted to stay in office for a little longer, all these wonderful things would have occurred, which would have shown how clearly their vision and perspicacity would have cast the ACT into a new light, and we would all have been saved. I do not believe that.
I think that the Labor Party members were saved only by time from a great series of mistakes coming to light, and I particularly think that it was fortuitous in a sense that they were not able to stay in power long enough to expose themselves as having no intention of getting on to a great many of the things of which they now claim to be advocates.
I am particularly intrigued by the way in which they now claim that they are the real champions of fair trading legislation and the sorts of things that appeared on our forward legislation program, particularly given that the evidence simply does not really back up that assertion. The document that my friend Mr Connolly refused to allow to be tabled today would clearly have shown, had members opposite been open-minded enough to see it, that the Government had placed fair trading legislation in its first priority category, for passage this session. There it is in black and white. It is only the obstreperousness and poor judgment of those opposite that prevented it being tabled this afternoon by the Attorney-General.
It is obvious, Mr Acting Speaker, that this Government has made a considerable effort to ensure that the issues raised in the report have been addressed and to see that action is
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