Page 4415 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 19 November 1991
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Clearly, the document was drafted not only without legal advice but in a culture dismissive of lawyers. This provision, along with much of the agreement, is extraordinary. In my own practice as a solicitor I have never seen anything quite like the agreement. It is comprehensively one of the most extraordinary agreements I have ever read. It not only extends a legal notion of contract into unprecedented folklore but also extends the English language. John McIntyre wrote on 15 March 1991 the following:
... what seems totally forgotten is why the Raiders moved to Bruce Stadium. For the record, we were approached in the mid 1980s to move to Bruce Stadium because of the losses being incurred at the site and its lack of use; it was agreed that the overriding basis for the Raiders to relocate would be that the Raiders would have total marketing rights for the ground and for which the Trust (or whatever) would receive a % of the income. This critical fact, a major theme which is right throughout the 1989 agreement, seems to have been conveniently forgotten by the Territory ...
and so on. Some may say that the Raiders have been damaged by their move to Bruce, both commercially and in their orientation. The fact is that this agreement was driven by the Labor Party for the political spin-off. They sent the Raiders out to Bruce on a blind date and are not prepared to tell us in the Estimates Committee what the upshot is. Ros Kelly and Clyde Holding sent the Raiders to a stadium which had been virtually unused for 10 years. The Vikings were asked to replace a white elephant. They have simply not been able to do it because the whole process is non-commercial.
MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Collaery, your time has expired.
MR HUMPHRIES (5.14): Mr Speaker, I think this Estimates Committee report is quite significant. It certainly goes rather further in many respects than estimates committees in the past have gone, and I think for good cause. In particular, Mr Speaker, some quite serious criticisms are levelled at Ministers in the ALP Government, which simply cannot be ignored. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that, if they are ignored, successfully at least, then the institution of democracy as we know it will be in some way affected.
I make that charge without any sense of hyperbole, because I believe that in many respects the attitude exhibited by some Ministers in this Government towards the Estimates Committee and the process it represents was quite pathetic. It represents a serious incursion into the idea of a government being accountable to the Assembly and to its committees in the work that it does.
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