Page 2804 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 September 1994
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The second issue, and the one which this Government simply has not addressed, was the problem of retaining the rights of the Territory to the supply of electrical energy from the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme, a right set in place, in concrete, when that scheme was first set in place by Sir Robert Menzies. It has existed to this day, and this Government has thrown that prerogative out the window because as of now it does not exist. It is all right for Mr Lamont to go off to his ministerial council meetings and it is all right for the Chief Minister to sit in her office and write letters to people and to talk about the grid. We agree entirely with the notion of the grid because it does allow us to do what Mr Lamont suggested. If we can buy electrical energy anywhere up and down the east coast at a spot price, at a lower price than what we are currently paying, we can go and buy it. It gives us the opportunity to go and buy it somewhere else cheaper. The fact is, however, that if we had retained our prerogative of access to the Snowy Mountains scheme it would be most unlikely that we would ever find a cheaper source.
Mr Lamont: Which you gave away.
MR KAINE: I did not give anything away.
Mr Lamont: You did.
MR KAINE: I did not give anything away; that is where you are misrepresenting, because all I did in December 1991, realising what the Commonwealth was proposing, was to write to the Prime Minister and state the case for the Territory, to get it on the record that we in the ACT had a problem that was going to follow from what the Commonwealth was proposing to do. We had to get it on the record and get some negotiations started. You lot flunked the negotiation test. I put it on the record. I put it on the table. I set out the problem. Mr Lamont and the Chief Minister failed the negotiation test. They picked up the negotiations after I had put them on the table as a matter that needed to be addressed.
What have we four years later? We have nothing. This is a matter of this Labor Government talking to its Labor mates across the lake. Clearly, they have no clout at all. In handling the negotiations badly, in playing their cards wrongly, obviously, they have sold the 300,000 residents of this Territory down the drain forever - not just tomorrow, not just next week, not just next year; forever. The prerogatives that we once had have been swept aside because this Government was so inept that they could not present their case in a convincing fashion; the Commonwealth would not even let them in through the negotiating doors.
The Commonwealth and the States of Victoria and New South Wales conducted the negotiations without us, and we sat here like a bunch of wimps and wrote letters to the Prime Minister. We did not go over there and hammer on the door and say, "Let us in. We have rights and we are entitled to be here". Oh, no, we write a letter to the Prime Minister. That was the total extent of the negotiation, the total extent of the protestations that have been put forward by this Government. Mr Acting Speaker, this Government has failed the test, they have failed this community, and they have failed this community for infinity, and they should hang their heads in shame.
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