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To pass legislation, for example, that will effect a better planning system in the Territory will be a difficult task and will require the cooperation and support of members on both sides of this chamber to achieve those goals. I do not pretend that we have a perfect set of answers to the problems of Canberra's planning regime.

Mr Moore: No; but we will help you.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Moore probably does, but others of us here do not. I believe that it is important for us to work together in the coming few months to decide how we will deal with that. For example, I have no personal commitment to either building up a greater density of Canberra's urban structure or spreading it at the edges. I have no particular views about which of those two should happen. I know that it is in many ways politically easier to expand at the edges than it is to build up our existing densities. That is an issue that we are going to have to address quite early in the Government's life. But, Mr Speaker, by the same token, I do not propose to make a decision and come into the Assembly and say, “Right; we are having 50 : 50 urban infill and greenfields sites. That is the decision, and you guys can live with it”. That was the approach taken by the previous Government. That was the approach which clearly, in the eyes of the majority of Canberrans, failed, and failed utterly, at the recent election. I do not want to be in that position, because I want to work through solutions to these problems which the majority of the community can support and which, I hope, a majority of members of this place can also support.

I know that members opposite regard the rhetoric, if you like, of Mrs Carnell's statement as just that - rhetoric. I assure you that that is not the case. We do believe that people's lack of confidence in the system of government in the ACT can be partly overcome by a willingness to demonstrate that members of this place can work together in the interests of solving Canberra's long-term and fairly intractable problems. Indeed, it is only by working together in that way that we can actually produce lasting solutions. The invitation remains open to all members of the Assembly to work in that way. I can assure members that I will be doing my best, as Minister for Planning and other things in this Government, to achieve that kind of outcome.

MR CONNOLLY (11.02): Mr Speaker, since the Government has really no business yet before the Assembly and we are filling out with this debate, I thought that I would show a spirit of cooperation and help the Government by filling out some of the time and also perhaps by giving new members of the Assembly instructions on some debating techniques which we have seen from Mr Humphries over the years and which we are clearly seeing again. In the standard form of debating at high school, university and competitive debating level, a very good technique is to set up what is known as - excuse the sexist language - the straw man and then knock it over. You portray your opposition as something they are not, and then you give convincing arguments as to why the something that they are not is a bad thing.

We have just seen Mr Humphries do that remarkably well in two respects. Firstly, he said that the former Government was driven by ideology, that it had ideology first and rational argument second, and that is a bad thing. That is a bad thing; but I would ask members to look at the issue of, say, corporatisation, on which we have heard much rhetoric, and look at our record versus their record. Our record was that we looked at the merits

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