Page 4822 - Week 16 - Monday, 25 November 1991
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We are rushing to the end of this parliament, rushing toward an election, and, as I say, it is just grandstanding, in the belief that it will gain votes. As I said before, I do not think that it will gain any votes. I think people will see through this. They will realise that it is not what is important. We should be waiting to find out exactly what this review will bring out. I think Mr Collaery will find that what he is doing now will be only part of what needs to be done. We could bring in a far better Bill that would cover all the area. Maybe we would bring in something that would be better than anybody else has.
Patching up things is never good enough. We need to do exactly what is the important thing. We, the ACT, can be the leaders in the community, the leaders in Australia doing much better than anybody else, not just patching up something by saying, "We need this; so let us throw it into the ring now. Let us decide that we will do this. This is important. Yes, that is fine". I always believe that if there is a national review under way we should see exactly what that national review has to say.
We do not need to put something like this into operation. Let us wait and see what the national review says. When it comes down, let us pick the eyes out of it and get the very best; not part of a bad bunch, not part of a pie, but the best part, so that the ethnic communities in this city can say, "We do have the best of interpreter services; we do have the best care of people in courts and elsewhere; not just a hotchpotch put together by somebody on the run, because the house is closing down and we are going into an election, in order to be able to say, 'I did that; I got that for you'.".
Half a job is just not good enough. A job done on the run is never good. Time needs to be spent on it. Time is needed to sort it out. This is an important thing, particularly as, on a population basis, this city has the largest number of ethnic groups of any city in Australia. We should be giving it a lot of care. We should be consulting with these people.
I do not think there has been any consultation about this with the people. As far as I can understand from the groups I have talked to, they have heard nothing of it. They do not know anything about it. They are very interested in this national review that is under way, particularly the Ethnic Communities Council. They want to see what comes out of that and then they want to fight the cause.
It is no good throwing something into the ring now and saying, "This is good enough; this will do; yes, we will do it, and then we will be able to go out and say at election time, 'We got this for you. This is what we did'.". If it is not good enough, then it is not good enough; it should be the best. Rushing into something like this is a mistake and I cannot support it.
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