Page 3917 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 23 October 1990
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because, as I indicated earlier, that particular building is in a much better state of repair than its counterpart at Orroral Valley.
The final chapter in the report is very significant because it deals with Commonwealth financial assistance. In the evidence given before the committee, the senior Australian representative of NASA informed the committee that, when a decision was made to decommission and evacuate both tracking stations, NASA, in fact, made an offer to the Commonwealth to demolish the buildings and rehabilitate the sites. If that had been taken up by Mr Hawke's Government at the time it would have saved us a lot of money in the Territory. According to NASA, representatives of the Commonwealth declined this offer. It is the committee's view that the state of the decline and the destructive levels of vandalism to the buildings are due in a major part to the inactivity of the Commonwealth Government during the 4 years the sites were under its direct control.
It is also our view that the Commonwealth, having chosen not to accept the offer from NASA to demolish the buildings, and having done little or nothing to preserve them, should be called upon to bear the cost of its own inaction. They were a national facility, providing an essential service to space research, and the Commonwealth did not take up that offer. Certainly the committee felt that it should bear the cost.
Accordingly, the committee recommended that the Commonwealth Government be asked to fund the cost of the demolition of the buildings at the Orroral Valley and Honeysuckle Creek space tracking stations. One would hope that the Commonwealth will not be as reluctant as it has been to advance the Territory moneys it should have advanced us over the last 18 months when called upon - I hope this Assembly will call upon it - to pay the full cost of demolishing those buildings and rehabilitating the sites.
MR MOORE (4.33): I would like to join with other members of the committee in thanking Mr Ron Owens for his contribution. I thank the other members of the committee for the hard work they put in and for their preparedness to discuss each issue and to look for solutions. I must say it is pleasing to see that we have a report that does not contain a minority report or any additional comments.
I think that the report really speaks for itself; so I do not propose to go through it in the way that Mr Stefaniak did. I want to mention just a couple of things. Dr Kinloch referred to Fowler's Modern English Usage. I suppose it is an appropriate time to draw the Assembly's attention - and Dr Kinloch's attention, perhaps - to the fact that some people like to think of dictionaries as dictating. Maybe they think the two words are related. But, of course, dictionaries and Fowler's Modern English Usage are not really designed to dictate the language. We have a living language and their job is to record what we do. Therefore only the most modern dictionaries, the most recent dictionaries, and the most recent versions of Modern English Usage can really assist us in ensuring that our language is appropriate. Otherwise, we would have a very stultified form of language, and that is something that I would oppose at any stage. Dictionaries and Fowler's Modern English Usage
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