Page 4233 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 29 November 1994
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Mr Humphries: On a point of order, Madam Speaker: You have made rulings in the past about the way in which members should be referred to in the Assembly. I assume that Mr Lamont is referring to the Opposition. He must be asked to withdraw those expressions.
MADAM SPEAKER: It is a rather risky point of order on your part, Mr Humphries. Are you Blynken or Nod? I do not know. Mr Lamont, if you do refer to members opposite directly, please refer to them by name.
MR LAMONT: I will. Mrs Carnell, Mr De Domenico and Mr Humphries seem to be having some sort of a dispute with Mr Kaine and Mr Stefaniak. That is quite clear from the terms of all their speeches this afternoon. On the one hand, we have had Mrs Carnell say, "This is the most outrageous abrogation of the committee system, notwithstanding that 17 members of the Assembly set it up and put it into place. This report should be thrown out, and nobody should pay any regard at all to it". Her deputy then gets up and starts to quote what he perceives as the evils of the Government and Government performance. He quite clearly is saying that Mrs Carnell does not know what she is talking about. I tend to concur with him.
What did Mr Humphries say in his dissertation? The only time that an Assembly committee's report is any good is when it is a media stunt; that is basically what he said. Unless you can go out and bag the Government in the media, then these reports are no good; that is fundamentally what he said. That is absolutely outrageous. But that gives you an understanding of the level of competence of the people sitting in the first three seats opposite us. What happened with Mr Kaine and Mr Stefaniak? Mr Kaine and Mr Stefaniak, I understand, were presented with a dissenting report prepared in Mrs Carnell's office and hand delivered to one of them before the report was even considered by the committee. Before the committee had even considered its position, Mrs Carnell's office hand delivered a dissenting report. This is from the Opposition who has the audacity to stand up here and criticise the work that has been undertaken by Ms Szuty and the other four members of the committee. For you people to sit in this chamber this afternoon, and to sit there with straight faces, really shows just how bankrupt you are. When you are fighting amongst yourselves, it is obvious - - -
Mr De Domenico: It is the TAB that is bankrupt, Mr Lamont.
MR LAMONT: Here it is. I was waiting. I knew that he could not sit there for longer than 30 seconds without rabbiting on. He talks about this amount of money there and this amount of money here. Here is the man that says, "We must have investment. We must have money. Look what you have done". This is the man who stood up in the debate today and said that a $40m investment in the ACT should not proceed. He has the audacity to sit there, along with his leader, to sit there along with Six-gun Kate, who is prepared to put a new bullet in every day, irrespective of what she said yesterday, and say that $40m worth of investment should be thrown out automatically, with no consideration or no examination. That is the position that she adopted yesterday. However, obviously in the party room this morning, Mr Kaine clearly
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