Page 66 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 7 April 1992
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Whatever the reason, I found no acknowledgment of them in the maiden speeches of the First Assembly and, as I vowed to correct this omission in my own inaugural speech to this house, I propose, three years late, to pay tribute to those people - the people who publicly worked for and advocated ACT self-government in the years 1986 to 1989, that is, following the abolition of the advisory assembly. They were not easy years in which to be promoting self-government; yet many of these citizens did so, not for personal or political gain, but simply because they believed in the rightness of self-government for the ACT.
For this commitment alone they deserve this small recognition. Thus I express my warm appreciation to Harold Hird and W.E. (Bill) Lawrence, MBE, of the movement for home rule, and from the other active organisation, the self-government campaign committee, its chair, Rosemary Nairn, and sometime or full-time members Ian Buchanan, Sue Craven, Graeme Evans, John Kelly, Bill Mason, Barry Reid and Moira Rowland. To these people and a few others, apart from my colleague and friend Trevor Kaine and me, belongs the public struggle for self-government - along with those more anonymous activists behind the scenes, and I concede that there were a number, such as Mr Humphries and our Chief Minister herself. I thank all of them for their efforts.
Turning now to the next three years, I would like to place upon record my support for another of our Chief Minister's very quotable quotes, namely:
The task for all of us here is to serve the people of Canberra; to govern on their behalf, in their interests and according to their wishes.
These are commendable aims which can be open to easy and convenient interpretation if we so choose. On the other hand, these words can also be accepted responsibly and with commonsense, so that the interests and wishes of this Territory's people are general interests and wishes of the average person and not the desires of noisy minorities.
For my part, I will try to represent such people - the decent and often forgotten silent majority; people who are not interested in heroin trials, covering up girlie magazines, and whether or not cigarette companies advertise upon sportsground perimeter fencing. They might not be particularly god-fearing either; but they are essentially honest, they are trying to bring up their children to be equally worthy citizens, and they are heartily sick and tired of more and more government regulations and attempted controls over their lives.
These are the people the Liberal Party has in mind when, in "We Believe", it speaks of the innate worth of the individual and the need to encourage initiative and personal responsibility, the basic freedoms of thought, of worship, of speech, of association, of choice and the right to be independent and to achieve. If such people and their modest aspirations have my support, then matters that are likely to threaten or disrupt their lives for no compelling or sensible reason will not.
Here I give clear warning to those among us, if any still exist in this Second Assembly, that I will not support the drift to authoritarianism I detected in the last Assembly in respect of some private members' Bills and amendments to government legislation. We are, let me remind members once more, in the words
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