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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 3 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 773 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

Never in the history of this Territory, nor, would I suspect, in the history of most governments, has there been a top administration so much under the dominance of the Chief Minister. We have not seen it before. She has the gall to say, "I got bad advice". What a shocking dereliction of responsibility! She does not want to accept it at all. It is disgraceful administration, in my view.

Mr Berry, I thought, gave a most effective speech. Point by point he showed the times that the Chief Minister had come into this Assembly and said, "We have saved money" - time after time. That was very pertinent to this motion, which criticises the Chief Minister and which censures the Chief Minister for recklessly misleading the Assembly. That is exactly what she did, and Mr Berry showed that most graphically. I think the Chief Minister will get off very lightly if all she suffers from this is a censure. There will be further debates down the track as we look at the hole that the health budget is now in, and there will be other motions arising, I should think, from that. The Chief Minister must accept the responsibility; but, poor soul, she has to pass it on to somebody else.

Let us talk about promises. This morning I read some of the promises in the Chief Minister's campaign policy launch, in her policy speech. Would you believe what she said? "We have not promised what we cannot deliver", she said. I repeat, "We have not promised what we cannot deliver". That is exactly what she has done. She made promises and she could not and did not deliver. What else did she say at the time? She said, "There is a crisis in Health because Labor cannot manage". Chief Minister, have a look at yourself. Where do you stand? I repeat the point that it is your management and nobody else's.

"Labor cannot manage", she said. What the Chief Minister inherited was a balanced health budget. She went through a long litany of complaints about the build-up to the VMOs dispute, omitting, as Mr Berry said, Mr Humphries's part in it; but nowhere did she want to acknowledge her own role in that and, above all else, that the last budget under the ACT Labor Government was a balanced budget - something which, with all her new management, all her new moves, everything she has done, she has been unable to emulate. Her management is simply not up to it. I come back to the specific point of today, and that is a censure motion for recklessly misleading the Assembly. That has been amply demonstrated and she must be strongly censured.

MR KAINE (11.46): I intend to be quite brief and I intend to address my remarks to Mr Osborne, Mr Moore and the two Greens because they have it in their power to support this motion or to reject it. We have listened to four speakers so far and there has been a bit of emotion there. In fact, from the Opposition side - - -

Mr Wood: Five speeches. One, two, three, four, five.

MR KAINE: Five; I am sorry. I do not count too well. I am not much of an accountant.

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