Page 4947 - Week 17 - Tuesday, 11 December 1990
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numbers that the Government has, there has been no censure of that behaviour. It is almost an endorsement of that behaviour.
Who was responsible for all this miserable failure that came to a head last Thursday? Was it Mr Duby or Mrs Nolan, who had flown off to Perth? I do not know; maybe not. Two out of their numbers left the Government still with a majority, so let us not blame them. Was it Mr Kaine or Mr Humphries, each of whom left knowing - or perhaps they did not know - that by so doing the Government was going to go into a negative position in terms of numbers? Or was it Mr Jensen, the Acting Whip, who at the time did nothing and only came into the fray rather ineptly later on? Was it Dr Kinloch or Mr Prowse? The Speaker was not able to handle the situation. Who was to blame? The only names that I have not mentioned are Ms Maher and Mr Stefaniak, two of the 10. We will leave them out of any sense of responsibility; but, of course, the blame is firmly sheeted home to the 10 Alliance members. No one person was responsible and there was no one oversight, or no one act of incompetence that was responsible for what happened on Thursday. It was due to the collective incompetence of the Alliance Government.
There are three basically incompatible groups, and in those are 10 people who are simply not capable of overcoming their inherent difficulties. The failure of this Government last week, the loss of dignity suffered in this Assembly, the lack of planning behind all this, the ineptness of it all and the incompetence are a result of the alliance that they have. Those tensions between the parts of the Alliance, those jealousies and rivalries between the members of the Alliance, the lack of openness and of confidence in each other led to this remarkable occurrence on Thursday last week. That is where the problem lies.
You simply are not able to manage yourselves; you cannot manage this parliament and you have certainly demonstrated that you cannot manage the ACT. And arising from all this, of course, are the suspicions. That is why you will not talk to each other; that is why Humphries came over here and not Jensen. There is all this suspicion, and we see it outside the front door today, demonstrated with the security arrangements.
Mr Connolly: Paranoia.
MR WOOD: Exactly. We see it up on the fifth floor which was once, I suppose, a cosy little enclave; it became a safe retreat and now it is nothing more than a fortified bunker to keep everybody away from the Government. You are not only suspicious of each other, you are suspicious of the whole community out there; so no wonder there was a mess last Thursday. No wonder the administration of government in this Territory is in a mess, and the dignity of this Assembly is the thing that suffers as we focus on
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