Page 1828 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 19 August 1992
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MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Deputy Speaker, I will move to another point. If it offends the Labor members opposite to hear about it, I will move onto something else.
There is obviously, in any situation where we have a federal system, and even in systems other than federal systems, a propensity to confuse the notion of the capital with the federal government or the national government. That is a quite natural phenomenon. I can assure members, if they did not know already, that Canberra is not the only place in the world that bears eponymously the attributes of the government that lives in that place; but there are occasions when that kind of association in the minds of people goes much too far. We have seen that in recent times with, in particular, a number of press reports which have made serious attacks on the very nature of the city of Canberra, the very nature of the fabric of Canberra, when they ought to have been attacking, and I think probably in some cases were meant to attack, the people in Canberra who have made decisions that have affected adversely others in Australia.
There have been plenty of such decisions, and the people of Australia have every right to be angry and concerned about some decisions made in this Federal capital; but they do not have the right, and members of the media do not have the right, to associate the people of the ACT, who either are unassociated with that government or merely serve that government as public servants, with the same brush. There is no right to do that, and we have every right to rise in this place to defend the people of the ACT who fall victim to those sorts of attacks.
Some outrageous Canberra bashing has been based on very flimsy facts; some has been based on outrageous scaremongering. I think all of us know that it is very easy to make that kind of attack because Canberra has, in the past, been generously endowed with certain things. Canberra has experienced considerable benefit because of Federal Government largess. The people of the ACT are hardly responsible for that. The people of the ACT have not arranged things in that fashion. If anything, they have received that benefit without any say in the matter.
Until only three years ago there was no effective mechanism for the people of the ACT to control the activities within their own jurisdiction. There was no self-government. The lack of self-government made, in a very real sense, the people of Canberra the total victims of the actions of Federal governments, of whatever persuasion they might be. We are now in a position where we have our own Assembly. We are now in the position of being able to defend ourselves, and to make the point that we are making today - that attacks on the city of Canberra and its people are unacceptable. We will not stand up for it. I believe that all members of this Assembly will support this motion that is before the Assembly today; that we will unite, I hope on a more bipartisan basis than has been the case so far in this debate, on this important question.
MR LAMONT (11.57): Very briefly, Mr Deputy Speaker, I concur with the concluding remarks of Mr Humphries, although not the substance of some of his earlier comments. Canberra bashing will be a vexed question for Canberra while ever it exists. A lot of journalists, with very tight schedules, find it much easier to say "Canberra", in much the same way as journalists in the United States will say "the capital" or "Washington". We are all then tarred with that brush if the journalist is trying to make an unfavourable comment. I make no accusation against journalists in general; but I do call upon that profession to understand not
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