Page 3211 - Week 11 - Thursday, 13 September 1990
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otherwise suffer from discrimination, and that it would allow them to take action in the ACT when they believed that they had been discriminated against.
As I said, Mr Speaker, I had always given Mr Collaery possibly a flattering view that he also would have believed in these kinds of ideals. Yet what we see today is his attempt to have this legislation withdrawn. The effect of the legislation is to promote human rights in the ACT. This is why I have introduced it, and I believe that any incidental effects - - -
Mr Jensen: Tell the truth, Rosemary.
MS FOLLETT: Mr Speaker, Mr Jensen has just said to me, "Tell the truth, Rosemary". I require that he withdraw that remark.
MR SPEAKER: Mr Jensen, please withdraw that comment.
Mr Jensen: I withdraw it, Mr Speaker.
MS FOLLETT: Mr Speaker, the legislation was prepared in my office, drafted by one of my private secretaries and introduced by me. This is just for the record, Mr Collaery - through you, Mr Speaker. The effect of this legislation is to promote human rights in the ACT. We have heard from members opposite that the effect of it is actually to incur expenditure. That is an incidental part of the legislation. I do not deny that it will cost money - money which, incidentally, has been allocated in your own budget. How you can now stand up and claim that I am requiring you to spend extra money, I just do not know. You allocated that money in your own budget which you introduced on Tuesday of this week. Your arguments are totally hollow. They arise entirely out of Mr Collaery's embarrassment and disappointment that he was not able to produce the legislation himself.
Mr Speaker, I put it to the Assembly that there are some courses of action open to members other than the withdrawing of this legislation. We could, for instance, as the Chief Minister has suggested, take up the matter with the Federal Parliament and, in fact, I have raised it in a letter to the Federal Parliament. I have asked what the members mean by this part of the legislation. I do not hear from members of the Government that they have taken any such action, and until I hear from them that they have, I doubt their credentials on this whole issue of section 65 of the self-government Act. They have done nothing about it. They have used it as a convenient excuse to attempt to curtail private members' business within this Assembly.
If you want to gain any credibility whatsoever - and I do believe the Chief Minister in his comments on the matter - then you need to take some action on it, not just ban our Bills in this knee-jerk way. This is a very childish way to behave, and it must be seen purely as political point
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