Page 499 - Week 02 - Thursday, 3 March 1994
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Mr Connolly: We are the Government; you are the Opposition.
MR HUMPHRIES: I am sorry. I am anticipating next year. I beg your pardon. I certainly would be happy to see that and might even join them myself up on the table. We might have trouble with the books there, but I am sure that we can overcome that.
Finally, Madam Speaker, the thing that has most annoyed me about this chamber - and it is a matter which I have raised with you and with your predecessor - is the fact that it is so incredibly dingy. It is a dingy place. It has heavy curtains that are drawn day after day, night after night. When I asked your predecessor why those curtains were as they were, he informed me that if we drew the curtains open we would be seen by people in Canberra. Madam Speaker, I am sick of the rule saying that I cannot open those curtains. Mr Westende agrees with me, and we are now going to open those curtains for the very first and last time.
MR KAINE (3.47): Madam Speaker, I know that Mr Lamont is going to groan if somebody else speaks to this motion.
Mr Lamont: Yes; we just want to get out, Mr Kaine.
MR KAINE: I know, and so do I.
Mr Humphries: If you want a cigarette, just go out now.
MR KAINE: He really wants to hear what I have to say. Madam Speaker, leaving this building and going to the South Building, of course, for some of us - for Greg Cornwell and me - is in some sense going back home. The Serjeant-at-Arms, I am sure, will agree with me. Some of us were in the South Building from those halcyon days of 1974 through to 1986, when the antecedent bodies of this Legislative Assembly were located in that building. It is a little incongruous - and I was talking to the Serjeant-at-Arms about this just a little while ago - that the new chamber over there in itself is bigger than the entire space occupied by the old Legislative Assembly, all of its staff and all of the secretariat - everything. Now we are to go back and occupy the entire building. I do not know whether that says something about the growth of government and whether we should be looking at that in some respects. For some of us it will be almost a returning home.
On the other hand, leaving this building will be the cause of some regret for most of us, I think. This building has a lot of ghosts in it, even though we have been here for only five years. How are we going to get along without the ghosts of Bernard Collaery, Hector Kinloch and others? I think it is a bit sad to leave those things behind. Unfortunately, we cannot pack them up and take them with us.
Mr Lamont: Fortunately, we cannot pack them up and take them with us.
MR KAINE: That is a matter of opinion. I think that those members added some colour to this place and - - -
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