Page 4900 - Week 16 - Tuesday, 26 November 1991
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Mr Collaery raised a valid point. There are dangers in this inquiry. It can open deep wounds, old wounds. It can raise issues that I thought had been settled long ago. It is possible, as he said, that some people can do considerable damage to the community by the way they react to this. I agree with Mr Collaery on that. It is one of the factors that were in my mind, one of the factors that caused me to wait to see whether Mr Humphries or anybody else was serious about an inquiry. The Government is going to mount an inquiry, and I will talk to my colleagues in this Assembly about it.
The Government will reject the proposal as moved by Mr Humphries. I did say earlier, although someone did not hear me, that in general those terms of reference are the sorts of things that would be included, but they can be refined. Dr Kinloch has a whole range of matters he would like to talk to the Government about. We will listen to him. Obviously, these are not the perfect terms of reference because they do not cover all the things we might like to cover; so let us work on the terms of reference.
Mr Duby asked me about the details. Mr Duby knows that I do not have those details, because I have not been attending to them. We have been sitting here for 10 long weeks waiting for Mr Humphries to show that he really has an interest in this. I will now act to establish this inquiry rather more quickly than Mr Humphries acted. I will not take 10 weeks to do it. You can be sure that I will move as quickly as I am able, to get it up and running. Ahead of that time, I will be able to respond to Mr Duby and others about who is going to run it, what the terms of reference will be, and what the reporting date might be.
MR HUMPHRIES (4.30), in reply: In closing this debate, let me respond to some of the issues that have been raised. I think most points have been covered very well and I do not need to go over them again. It is good to see that a bit of heat on the Government has produced something at long last. The Government pretends to be very nonchalant about this proposal, as though it is water off a duck's back. I note that throughout most of the discussion of the MPI all government members were present in the chamber, which is a very unusual occurrence in this place. Obviously, something was stirring them up to get down here to the chamber. Something was going on that caused them to come down here and listen to this debate, for a change.
I also note that we have heard the Minister say on several points, "There is really nothing in these moves today that has caused us to move for this inquiry. We are not really being pressured into making this decision. We would have made it anyway at about this time". If I had not foreshadowed very clearly yesterday in the media that there would be a motion in these terms today, does anyone seriously believe, listening to this debate, that there
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