Page 4075 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 22 October 1991
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MR COLLAERY: He is now saying that he read the agreement. I do not know; he should not rush in in that way. If he is saying that he read it and that he read the December 1990 review report, I wonder why he made a decision before he had the June 1991 review report. Clearly, it has caused significant political damage to his career. In many parts of Canberra it has lowered the esteem of self-government. It has not just been a blow to the Follett Government; it has been a blow to the people of the ACT, who expected us to negotiate and sign an agreement which would be kept, in the community interest. Shame on the Follett Government for breaching that agreement.
MR MOORE (8.53): Mr Deputy Speaker, it has been very interesting to listen to the various speeches, particularly those from Mr Connolly and Mr Collaery. Mr Collaery, in the latter part of his speech, during the extension of time, indicated that what we need now is to negotiate a new agreement. Perhaps that is true, but it takes me back to two of his major mistakes.
The first was the agreement he negotiated, which was an absolute disaster. It gave away the possibility of the very thing Colin Winchester had advocated and the very thing the editorial in yesterday's newspaper drew attention to - the possibility of a contract police force. That would have left us in a sensible and reasonable negotiating position. It was something Mr Collaery threw away, long before the negotiations had reached anywhere near a sensible stage. One of the first things he did was to say, "Don't worry. We are going to have the Federal Police. They are going to be our police force and we are going to negotiate from that basis". That was the first mistake he made.
The second major mistake he made was when this side of the house moved and backed a motion to have this Assembly establish a committee to look into police force finances and arrangements. It was Mr Collaery who spoke against it and convinced his colleagues that such a thing was inappropriate. The Alliance hung together then and defeated that motion on the floor of the house, against all other members. At that stage there was strong support from Mr Stevenson to look into police finances. It was a most appropriate thing for an Assembly committee to do and something we would have approached with open minds, to make sure that we were in a position to understand and to do our best to convey what we saw as the important issues involved.
What Mr Collaery perhaps is discovering is that it is very easy to negotiate and give money away, to increase funding for the police in the way he did. It is very difficult to take the money away again, and that is what came through in the editorial in yesterday's newspaper. That message more
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