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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 9 Hansard (23 November) . . Page.. 2378 ..

MR OSBORNE (continuing):

about this budget, but it has not, and I suggest that is because they have terrible thoughts that one day they may be in government. I support Mr Moore, as I am sure the Greens will. What has been done today and over the last week has certainly clarified a lot of things about this Assembly and how I will be operating over the next 21/2 years.

MR WOOD (4.20): It is clear that Mr Moore has a problem. It is also clear that it is of his making. Eight months ago, I recall, he sat in this chamber and he voted for Mrs Carnell and he said, "I will vote for her budget". The problem is Mr Moore's; he created it. He now seeks to avoid that responsibility, and he simply cannot do it. His commitment to Mrs Carnell and to her budget was his. It was not the Labor Party's; we opposed it. Rosemary Follett was our candidate for Chief Minister of the ACT. Mr Moore's mock anger, for that is what it is, cannot disguise that fact.

I want to go back and make a further point for Mr Moore. This day is historical. It was not until I turned up Hansard that I recalled that on 23 November 1993, two years ago almost to the hour - it was at 3.18 pm, which is about the time this debate started - Mr Moore moved a motion of no confidence in a Minister. He moved that motion of no confidence in these terms:

That this Assembly expresses a lack of confidence in the Minister for Education and Training for the proposed cuts to teacher positions in Government schools in the Australian Capital Territory.

That is the motion Mr Moore moved two years ago to this day. There is a reasonable motion before the Assembly today, rather along the same lines. It is not a motion of no confidence; it is a motion of censure. In this case it is censure of the Treasurer for what she has done. It would seem eminently sensible to me, and quite logical, for Mr Moore, who moved that motion two years ago against the then Minister, to be consistent and support a very similar motion in this Assembly today. That is the way out of the problem he created for himself when he supported the current Government.

MS TUCKER (4.23): I share the frustration of the crossbenches. Labor and Liberal are working together here today in a way that is appalling if you have any real sense of the nature of this budget and how much it has failed. We keep hearing that we supported Mrs Carnell as Chief Minister, and we did. The reason the Greens did that was that we heard her rhetoric about open and consultative government and about open budget processes. Perhaps it was naive to expect that it should happen as she stated, but we did expect that it would. Open budget processes do not have to lead to the chaos that the older parties keep insisting they will. They quote the United States at the moment because it is always convenient in an argument to try to find where something has failed absolutely, without looking thoughtfully at why or whether there might be other ways of addressing the problem. The fact is that we do have a minority government in the ACT, and there is a likelihood that that will continue to be the case.

This morning Mr Humphries in his discussion on CIR stated that he felt the people of Canberra were wise and that there needed to be more participation, that the few members in this place did not necessarily have all the wisdom, and that they needed more input. That was 17 members he was referring to. What we have here is basically four members who have come up with a budget. We have been told by Mrs Carnell that we have a place

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