Page 4024 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 22 October 1991
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Mr Berry: You are just about to get a lesson in public speaking.
MR DUBY: That might well be the case. The simple fact also remains that Mr Connolly has on a number of occasions misled this Assembly in question time.
Mr Connolly: I take a point of order, Mr Speaker. You ruled today, quite correctly, that if there is an allegation of misleading the Assembly in question time there needs to be a substantive censure motion. Now he is going ahead. The person who actually made the allegations originally, whose question it was, is not moving it; Mr Duby is moving it. But, in moving this censure motion on this alleged misleading, he is now saying that I repeatedly mislead. He must be called to order on that, unless he is referring to this topic.
MR SPEAKER: Yes.
MR DUBY: As the motion says, the answers given on Thursday and today have misled this Assembly. Mr Connolly has repeatedly misled this Assembly in question time. He deserves to be censured for this action. Indeed, the whole Labor minority Government deserves to be censured for their frivolous attitude and the frivolous way they approach question time, and, indeed, the general duties of a government in this Assembly. They treat this Assembly with disdain. They do such things on a daily basis.
As I said, this motion has not been moved with any malice. This has been moved for the simple reason, Mr Connolly, that you simply have not a big enough heart to say, "Yes, perhaps I made a mistake". Instead, you have tried to bluff your way out of this, in the typical disdainful way that the whole of your Government treats the rest of the members of this Assembly. You deserve to be censured and I have a funny feeling that you will be.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (4.05): Mr Speaker, I think the genesis of a censure motion here is to be found in the Canberra Times weekly review of the events of the Assembly of last weekend which reported that the Opposition basically has been unable to lay a glove on the Government for some weeks and has been performing their role as an Opposition fairly pathetically. They have decided that they cannot do any good in question time, they cannot do any good in MPIs - nobody reports their MPIs, which are contradictory in any event - and so they will hit on the little stunt of moving censures and use their numbers against the minority Labor Government to no doubt sequentially censure the Ministers.
But Mr Speaker, while I fully expect that that is the political reality of the situation - Mr Duby said so himself; the numbers have been done; we saw the deal being done - it is important that the record be put in order.
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