Page 3344 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 18 September 1990
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the house; in fact, she was here hardly at all today. I see she is here now, and that is a bit of a turn-up. She spends very little time on the floor of the house. She makes no worthwhile contribution to the debate when she is here. I have a copy of her response to the budget. I have a copy of the original - not what she actually said, but what she would have said if she had thought about it at the time. She made no counter proposals whatsoever to what she asserts is a lack of action on the Government's part. There was not one constructive point in the entire speech.
I would suggest that the Leader of the Opposition ought to go back and read my address in reply last year, which was, in fact, equal time. I was given equal time and I used every minute of it. I made some very constructive comments in my response which, in fact, are the very things that this Government is doing today in most areas. And I did not simply criticise her budget; I put forward some very constructive proposals as to how it could have been improved, and should have been improved. Despite the fact that I have taken her to task over this many times, her approach is to continue simply to distort and to misrepresent. Even her own mates are beginning to object to this. I am gratified that an increasing number of Labor voters and former Labor voters, who contact me constantly, have expressed their concerns about her negative approach as the Leader of the Opposition.
Ms Follett: What, Paul Whalan? Paul Whalan rings you every day?
MR KAINE: No, Paul Whalan was your best performer, and you really do need to worry about the fact that you let him get away.
I would just like to run through some of the things that the Leader of the Opposition said in her response to the budget, where she distorts and she misrepresents. I do not have to go past page 2. Page 1 was fairly innocuous - but page 2! I would like to read into the record the paragraph in her speech that she did not read. She skipped over this paragraph. She was talking about how the Government had been influenced by people from out there who had made inputs to us. This is the bit that she missed:
The Treasurer went on to say that this consultation with himself was supplemented by inputs from the TLC and CARD.
She did not read that bit out because it did not suit her to acknowledge that I, in fact, had had consultations with the Trades and Labour Council. Hansard will show that the Leader of the Opposition left that paragraph out of her speech entirely. Even the things that she might have said she neglected to say, and she was quite deliberate about it.
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