Page 5104 - Week 17 - Wednesday, 12 December 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MR BERRY (3.45): It gets curiouser and curiouser. The member who introduced this matter of public importance, of course, talks about a government that does not do things in a period which would allow fair and adequate consultation and so on and so forth. This all comes from a person who belonged to the infamous Abolish Self Government Party - a party which, in my view, did not do things too fairly when it presented itself to the electorate, and in a campaign which, in my estimation, was deliberately conjured to mislead.
Mr Stevenson: On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker: Mr Berry has no evidence on which he makes that false claim. I would ask that he withdraw it.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: I do not believe that that is a point of order. Perhaps you can claim that he misrepresented later on, Mr Stevenson; but I do not really think that is a point of order. Continue, Mr Berry.
MR BERRY: The fact of the matter is that it was a campaign that was unfair to the people of the ACT and they elected somebody whom they would not ordinarily elect if they knew the full agenda, so to speak. It is also curious that Mr Stevenson - an abolitionist of the government process, he alleges - talks about fairness and adequacy in the passage of Bills through this place, and he then talks about the safeguards provided by an upper house review. That strikes me as odd in the extreme.
Ms Follett: He wants to abolish two houses.
MR BERRY: Indeed, if one was affixed with the abolition strategy, one would like to look for all sorts of things to abolish - bellybuttons, houses of review, videos and all sorts of things. But some of the issues that were raised by Mr Stevenson are, indeed, serious. This Government, though it claims to be peppered with people who support consultation, has not been able to produce the goods.
Mr Duby: Not me.
MR BERRY: Mr Duby says, "Not me", and I agree. He has never ever claimed that he, in any way, supported this consultation stuff. I accept Mr Duby's credentials in that respect. There is a peppering, although a lightweight one, of people in the Alliance Government who claim to support the consultation mode, but they have not been able to influence the conservative elements of the Government to fall into line with their aims and objectives. In fact, there is no evidence that they have tried very hard to do that. We have seen that groups affected by Government decisions - sometimes not Bills or Acts of this Assembly - have not been consulted fully, though the Government argues that they have been.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .