Page 4830 - Week 16 - Monday, 25 November 1991
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PERSONAL EXPLANATIONS
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services): Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, pursuant to standing order 46, I seek leave to make a personal explanation.
MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER: Do you claim to have been misrepresented, Mr Connolly?
MR CONNOLLY: I do, indeed.
MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER: Please proceed.
MR CONNOLLY: In Mr Collaery's concluding remarks on that Bill he launched into a diatribe of invective against me in which he accused me of somehow acting in an underhand fashion by scuttling away with a document and not letting him read it. To start with, the fact of the matter is that memos from a department to a Minister are confidential and need not be shown to anyone; but I did show Mr Stefaniak, from the Liberal Party, the document in order to explain to him, in effect, why the Government was taking the view that it did. I provided him with a copy of the document.
I discussed the matter with Mr Collaery. I said to Mr Collaery that the Government was opposing his Bill for the reasons essentially stated in my speech - that is, that we felt that it was unnecessary and that I had advice to this effect. Mr Collaery perused the document, certainly to the point of seeing the signature of the officer who wrote it, because he made some comments about the officer who wrote it. I said, "Do you want to have a look at the document?". Mr Collaery at no stage said that he wanted to have a look at it. If he had wanted to have a look at it, I would have given it to him.
As I understood the position, he understood what the Government's view was - that is, we were going to have a debate on the issue. Essentially, the issue of division between the Government and the Residents Rally on this was clear - that is, we thought it was unnecessary in advance of the national uniform approach, and Mr Collaery felt that it was appropriate for the ACT to, in his words, "give a lead". So, the points of difference were clear. He, I assumed, did not think it was necessary to go through the detail as we perused, very briefly, some of the detailed opposition in this. If he had wanted the document, if he had asked me for the document, I would have given it to him.
I was surprised and somewhat disappointed to hear a personal diatribe directed against me, suggesting that I had acted in some way in an underhand fashion. I reject that assertion. If he had wanted the document, I would have given it to him. I assumed from our brief discussion
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