Page 618 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 April 1994
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Members interjected.
MADAM SPEAKER: Order! I am trying to tell members that if anyone wishes to speak again they will need leave. The standing orders were suspended in terms of time limits, not the number of times that people spoke. Is leave granted for Mr Humphries to speak again?
Leave granted.
MR HUMPHRIES (8.57): Thank you, Madam Speaker. I want to respond to a few of the issues that have been raised in the course of the debate, particularly some points made by the Minister. My colleagues Mr De Domenico and Mr Cornwell also will raise some of those matters and address those, as well as Mrs Carnell who will sum up our case and, I hope, comprehensively refute the points that have been made by the Minister.
I must say, Madam Speaker, that I found the Minister's general comments and his defence of his actions to be fairly pathetic. I would have expected a Minister fulsomely prepared to defend the decision he had made if he believed that the decision was a good decision. I would have expected a Minister who would come to this place and identify the complete inaccuracies of what was alleged about these matters, rather than say, for example, as he did so often in the speech he gave this afternoon, "Well, I was advised this". For example, in the case of the competition question, he said, "Bob Hawke said this and Mr Neck said that and the man from VITAB said that, and I felt that I was entitled to believe what was said because they all told me that that was the case". I think that is a pretty pathetic kind of defence.
We do not rely on Mr Hawke, or Mr Kolomanski, or anybody from VITAB, or Mr Neck, for that matter, to oversee the totality of this Minister's portfolios. We rely on the Minister. He ultimately is the person, under the Westminster system, with collective and individual responsibility to this place, who has to be able to come in here and, in a sense, wear the responsibility for decisions that he makes. Sometimes he relied on other people to give him advice, but on occasions he has to check that advice. The point that the Opposition is making in this place today is that Mr Berry had alarm bells ringing that sounded like a thousand fire trucks bearing down on somebody's house, and not until very late in the piece did he start to ask the questions he should have asked. The fact is that he did not.
Madam Speaker, he also put up a whole number of straw men in this debate, a whole number of allegations, and he knocked them down. The problem with these allegations is that they are not actually the allegations that have been made by the Opposition. For example, he stood up there and comprehensively refuted the idea that Michael Dowd had an association with Alan Tripp. We were gratified to hear that that was the case, but we had not alleged that Mr Dowd had any association with Alan Tripp. Mr Berry stood up there and said, "The Libs are wrong to say that Mr Bartholomew was a director of VITAB". The Liberals have never said that he was a director of VITAB. The Liberals have said that he was a player in the VITAB deal, as indeed he was. He formed the agreement. He negotiated the agreement.
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