Page 2622 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 24 August 1994
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"I viewed that premature announcement as a deliberate political attempt by Mr Lamont to influence those TAB-to-TAB negotiations," Mr Downy said.
He went on to say:
But Mr Lamont's inference that we should have invited ACTTAB into our pool without restrictions or conditions on poaching punters from NSW is naive in the extreme.
Mr Lamont, naive.
MS FOLLETT (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (3.50): Mr Deputy Speaker, Mrs Carnell unfortunately started her incredibly fanciful diatribe with a statement that contained two fundamental errors. She said at the start that this was "a business deal signed under a veil of secrecy between the Follett Government and the world's only privately owned TAB". That statement alone demonstrates the depths of her ignorance or her absolute pig-headedness on this subject, which I suspect is closer to the truth. Mrs Carnell knows full well, as does every member in this Assembly, that that deal was not signed between the Government and anybody. Mr Deputy Speaker, the deal was signed, as members know, between ACTTAB and VITAB. They are an organisation statutorily established to have those powers, and that is what they did. She also referred to "the world's only privately owned TAB". That, I think, is a bit of a Freudian slip or a convenient lapse of memory. She has forgotten, obviously, that VITAB was not the only private TAB. In fact, it was not even the only one on Vanuatu. There was another, the Chung Corporation, and that was the one that the Victorians signed up with.
We have heard absolutely nothing new from Mrs Carnell. All we have heard is a rehearsal, in perhaps more vitriolic terms, getting ever more vitriolic, but nothing new. The issues that have been canvassed in this so-called MPI were canvassed ad nauseam in a very lengthy no-confidence motion debate, a serious matter. They have been inquired into in full by the Pearce inquiry, and they have had full media coverage and political debate constantly. They were debated in the Assembly when I presented the Government's response to the Pearce report. The Liberals seem to be operating on the basis that there is so much time and space available in the local media that anything that they say will be reported, no matter how many times they repeat the same rubbish and the same untruths. They are adopting a very old propaganda approach; that if you throw enough mud some of it must stick. This is the Goebbels technique, Mr Deputy Speaker; that if the lie is so big people will be inclined to believe it.
The first point that I want to make today is that the whole premise of the MPI is based on a big lie. There is no other way of putting it. As I said, the Government did not make a decision to enter into the VITAB contract. The facts of the matter are quite clear. The contract was a contract involving ACTTAB, which is a commercial authority with independent powers and legal responsibilities created by laws passed in this Assembly.
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