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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 1 Hansard (22 February) . . Page.. 221 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

are doing here to develop something that shows a much longer term strategy. There was some discussion yesterday about adversarial government, whether or not it was a good thing, and how it was referred to in the government reform paper. If you could all agree, within the adversarial system, on a long-term strategic plan, that adversarial system would not necessarily have to always cause negative impacts on the development of strategies which are absolutely essential for all developing countries if we are to have a decent environment for our kids.

MR SPEAKER: Order! The time for the discussion has now expired.

MR BERRY (4.41): Mr Speaker, I seek leave to move a motion to allow Mr De Domenico and Mrs Carnell to apologise to this Assembly for misleading it.

Leave granted.

MR BERRY: I move:

That this Assembly grants Mr De Domenico and Mrs Carnell the opportunity to apologise for misleading the Assembly during discussion of the matter of public importance.

This will not take a great deal of time. I was listening intently to the debate. One of the things I have learnt in this place is that there are some eagle-eyed people around trying to discover where people may have misled the Assembly, and I know that they have strong feelings about this issue. Mrs Carnell, in relation to the Melba Health Centre, tried to create the impression that somebody else removed the services from the health centre and then she had to close it. Mrs Carnell was the one who decided that there would be no bulk-billing doctors there and it was Mrs Carnell who decided to close it as a result. Mrs Carnell was the initiator. She tried in her speech to create the impression that it was somebody else's fault. This Assembly deserves an apology from her for trying to create the impression that she has had nothing to do with the removal of services. It was her Government's idea entirely.

In the case of Mr De Domenico, he made a strong point about the promise they had made to increase the threshold on payroll tax. He made that point firmly and he said, "We made that promise and we implemented it". Well, he lied. What the Liberals promised was to decrease the percentage, and they never did that; so he lied. What he ought to do is apologise to this Assembly, and he should be given the opportunity to apologise to this Assembly for recklessly or deliberately misleading it.

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