Page 2163 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 29 May 1991
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There is a saying: The fool and his money are soon parted. Believe you me, they are fools because they will be parted from the voters. The voters will not support them on polling day on this. But we know, of course, that we are not going to get that chance, because they are going to stay with the Government; they are going to be there. And we hear this nonsense of sitting on cross benches. Why did they not sit on the cross benches from the very beginning and vote against these sorts of policies that we have had to put up with in Canberra?
These policies have destroyed a city that people love and have enjoyed living in - because they decided that they could not balance the budget. That is the whole truth about it - they could not balance the budget, whereas the Chief Minister at the time, Rosemary Follett, could. We put the burglars in charge of the budget, and now we do not know where the money has gone, except that it has overrun in the hospitals by $17m.
We know that there is a $600,000 overrun in ACTION. Of course, we are told that it is petrol and tyres. Yet they could waste money on things like destroying Casuarina Sands - the things that people wanted to keep in Canberra. That is only a small thing. It is nowhere near as important as hospitals and schools, but it was a place to which people went to enjoy it and that had been in Canberra for a long time. But the Government says, "Oh, no, we can waste $66,000 on that; it does not matter". There is also the fact that they gave contracts to companies that were in trouble. They did not check them out. We now have workers who do not have jobs and have lost out on their holiday pay and long service pay. Did they care about that? Did they check any of this out? No, they did not.
They have now told us that they are going to sit on the cross benches but they are going to vote with the Government. So, they have let us know that the Chief Minister is going to get a vote of confidence in him. Is that not great! And they are going to go out and play the martyrs. I understand that when Mr Collaery walked out of the house there were people who gave him white feathers. People may not remember what they were during the war, but I remember my mother telling me that people gave out white feathers in the First World War to people who stayed home and did not go out and support their country. Well, the Residents Rally did not support us.
Mr Humphries: Like in the Gulf war?
MRS GRASSBY: Look, Mr Humphries, we do not blame you; those are your policies - sell out to the big people; sell out to the developers. At least we know where you are coming from; you are honest. But that is not the case for these other people. As for Mr Stevenson sitting down there and saying that he did not want self-government, why did he not resign? Why did he stay here and take his salary - and sleep in the house, drive without a licence and all these
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