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Mrs Carnell: No. It is an indefinite ban. It says it in his motion.

MR DE DOMENICO: Yes, but if they stop next week are we going to buy the products again?

Mr Moore: We will bring the motion back.

MR DE DOMENICO: “We will bring the motion back”, Mr Moore says. What about existing contracts that your Government signed, Mr Berry? Do we cancel those? Do we cancel the contract with Renault, for example? What about the Chinese? Do we deal with the Chinese or do we not? Are we allowed to buy Chinese products?

Mr Kaine: What about the Taiwanese Chinese?

MR DE DOMENICO: They are different, are they? It is a silly motion, Mr Speaker, and I think Mr Berry ought to go back to the drawing board and have a good hard look at what he wants us to support before he comes into this place calling everybody Richard Craniums and all sorts of names and getting a bit personal. We can all get personal, but on this side of the house we will not. We will get very political, but we will not get personal. Mr Berry, have a good look at what you really want us to support. Even you will realise that it is a silly motion. It is unsupportable. By the time we do the inventory that you want us to do, the French will probably elect another socialist President. By the time we do the inventory that your motion wants us to do, the next French elections will be over. For that reason, Mr Speaker, this motion should not even be voted on. It is a silly motion. Mr Berry should withdraw it and go back to the drawing board.

MR MOORE (12.11): Of course, if you think you are going to lose a motion, the first thing you do is look at the language and see how you can rip it apart. The Government has done that fairly successfully.

Mr Kaine: Is that what you do?

MR MOORE: Mr Kaine interjects, “Is that what you do?”. Mr Kaine has observed my techniques on many occasions. It is not new to parliamentary processes. It is a part of the way we sometimes debate.

Mr Speaker, we have a perfectly rational motion which gives the Government some room to move. Instead, they choose to read it in a very narrow way. Mr De Domenico says that this will stop us from dealing with French people, and raises the spectre of the French language being cut from our schools and so on. None of that is in the motion, Mr Speaker. First of all, the motion requires the Government to provide a list of products which are manufactured by French companies or are produced in France. A government that wanted to take that very casually would give Mr Berry and the Assembly, if we approve this motion, a list of only 10 or 15 products. A genuine response would be a list of the main sorts of things that are purchased by the ACT Government. How the Government deals with this area is what we are interested in. I think it is very easy to read into a motion things that are not there, particularly if you do not want it to succeed.

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