Page 2222 - Week 07 - Thursday, 6 June 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
this game of no-confidence motions. How much more sensible it would be to have a city council, with an elected mayor and aldermen, for a fixed term of office. I wish that, at the very least, we had a collegiate government, and I commend Mr Kaine once more for having suggested that.
Secondly, I regret the circumstances which have brought us to this particular no-confidence motion. Recently I have sought to avoid such motions of censure or no confidence, or to vote against them, as in the cases of Mr Humphries recently and Mr Stevenson. I cannot avoid this one, for obvious reasons; so, although I would prefer to abstain, I will not do so, as abstention is in itself a political choice.
Thirdly, I wish to discuss some implications of my 26 April letter of resignation from the Alliance Government. I stress the context and circumstances of that letter. At the time Trevor Kaine was Chief Minister, Bernard Collaery was Deputy Chief Minister and Norman Jensen was Executive Deputy for planning. As I say in my letter at the opening of a paragraph on page 2:
In resigning, I am not opposing the Government as such.
My resignation at that time was not designed to bring down that Government of which two of my Rally friends and colleagues were a part. In the next paragraph, I commended them for their work and said that they:
... will ably continue to represent the Rally viewpoint on the casino issue from within the Alliance Government.
In that resignation letter, therefore, I wished to give no comfort to anyone who might want to divide the three of us over the issues we care about, and I wished to avoid any political act which would bring down that Government. It was necessary, therefore, for me to opt out of any vote of censure or vote of no confidence in relation to members of that Government. That I did, for example, in the case of Mr Humphries.
In that same paragraph in which I stressed, "I am not opposing the Government as such", I noted my view that Trevor Kaine "is the ablest member of the Assembly for that difficult task". I commented, "I will not join in any vote of censure against him". Neither I would have, if the Kaine-Collaery Government had continued. I continue to argue today that, in himself, when he is at his best - and I have to say that I have also seen him at his worst - Trevor Kaine is the ablest member of the Assembly for the task of Chief Minister.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .