Page 437 - Week 02 - Thursday, 14 May 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MR KAINE: The financial change in the hospital system was initiated by the Alliance Government. All you have done, as with all of your initiatives, is pick it up and run with it. Then you have the effrontery to claim it as a Labor initiative for micro-economic reform. This is no more an ACT Labor Government initiative than any of the other things that are going on in the ACT at the moment.
Mr Connolly says that we achieved nothing while we were in government. The hospital reconstruction program that you have screwed up in the last year was an initiative of the Alliance Government. The only major infrastructural change undertaken in the ACT since self-government was initiated by the Alliance Government, and you tried to kill it off. You had your $50,000 investigation that you thought would kill it off, but it did not kill it off; so you have had to continue with it.
Are you going to say that micro-economic reform in terms of getting the ACT Government working better and getting it to work more efficiently, such as corporatising functions, corporatising the TAB, corporatising Totalcare Industries at Mitchell, were your initiatives? Of course you are not. You cannot go that far. The next step was to corporatise ACTEW. When all the preliminary work had been done to corporatise ACTEW, you got the government back. What did you do with it? Like all change, you stuck it on the backburner. You do not want to change anything. You are the most conservative government in Australia and you have the effrontery to come in here and talk about micro-economic reform. You do not even know what the term means. For Mr Connolly to get up and claim this piece of work as an ACT Labor Government initiative is breathtaking in its audacity.
I am sure that Bob Hawke, who put it on the agenda first in 1990, would be astonished to discover that Rosemary Follett is claiming that it is hers, or that Mr Connolly is claiming it as his, as with any of the other matters of micro-economic reform that have come out of that Special Premiers Conference process. As for the electricity grid, Ms Follett claims some sort of victory in that we are actually a participant in the process of change in the reticulation, generation and supply of electricity. She was not even a party to the initial agreement to do that. She was not even a party to the rail freight authority. It all happened when she was out of office.
All of the initiatives currently taking place are taking place as a result of either initiatives of the Alliance Government or a process that I participated in as Chief Minister, not Ms Follett. I defy you, Mr Berry, and I defy Mr Connolly, to produce one single initiative for change or micro-economic reform that has been initiated by this Labor Government. There is not one. You pick up everybody else's initiatives and you run with them and then claim them as your own. I think it is disgraceful. I conclude, Madam Speaker, as I began: I had agreed with Ms Follett that this was a good initiative and that we would provide bipartisan support, and then Mr Connolly got on the floor and wanted to kick us in the head. Ms Follett will need to be a bit careful when she seeks bipartisan support in the future, because she may find that she does not get it.
MR STEVENSON (10.44): As far as the legislation goes, I think there are many areas, particularly within the road rules, that would well apply to every place in Australia. I think we could readily agree on that - certainly vehicles keeping to the left in over 80 kilometres an hour zones. However, I think there is a principle that is probably worth addressing, and that is to do with which government
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .