Page 2633 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 24 August 1994
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Mr Kaine: You were not thinking of "stuff-up", were you?
MR HUMPHRIES: I was, yes. There is no other way to describe the disaster that this entire affair has been for the ACT. We have spent, on the Government's own admission, $3.3m achieving something. What? What does the taxpayer of the ACT have to show for this $3.3m of his or her money? Absolutely nothing; not a bean. It is a complete and utter waste of the taxpayers' money. This Government does not have even the common decency to come into this place and say, "Oops, we are sorry".
Some members of this Government, like the man over here, still insist that this was a good deal. Some of them have not had the decency to work out that this has cost the Territory a great deal of money, and that it is their fault that it went very badly wrong. That, Madam Speaker, speaks volumes about where this Government comes from. These people believe in a black-and-white world. They believe that what they do must be right, and if things go wrong it is "the forces of darkness", to quote Mr Lamont, the Darth Vaders dwelling on the fringe, out to destroy this wonderful, altruistic Labor Government, who are the real cause of their problems. Madam Speaker, nobody is fooled by that.
Nobody doubts for an instant that the cause of this problem is Mr Wayne Berry, and Mr Wayne Berry alone. It was he who authorised the contract with VITAB. It was he who went to ACTTAB's headquarters in Dickson and held hands with Mr Bob Hawke and the other directors of VITAB and said, "What a great deal we have for the Territory!". It was he who was prepared to shoulder all of the credit which he thought was going to come from this VITAB deal. It is he who must take the blame for the fact that today the taxpayers of this Territory have been ripped off to the tune of something like $4m. How many weeks' pay would that be, Mr Berry? Certainly, more than you are likely ever to receive from working in this place.
Madam Speaker, we have seen in the last few weeks, indeed, since the beginning of the year when the VITAB deal started to go very badly wrong, extremely impressive examples of twisting and turning, of dodging and weaving, of catapulting and ducking in order to avoid the responsibility which this Government must face up to for having made a ghastly mistake. It is a great pity that the Commonwealth Games do not include the 100 metres blame dodging, because Mr Lamont, in today's exercise, would make himself an Australian champion in that sport. Let us go through some of the things that have been said in the last few weeks. Again I quote what he said to ABC radio on 18 August when talking about the New South Wales TAB offer at the time, which was being considered:
They had such things as a processing fee that was five percentage points higher than that which we achieved in the Victorian pooling arrangement.
Oops! I wonder why that five-page ministerial response to a question had to come out yesterday - a five-page ministerial statement masquerading as an answer. It was to get in the fact, buried somewhere in that answer, that Mr Lamont had - - -
Debate interrupted.
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