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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 3 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 783 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

officers provided for me."? Of course she could not accept that excuse. That would be totally unacceptable as far as she is concerned. We would hope that she would not accept that excuse; that she would require a greater level of professionalism than that from her officers.

Mr Speaker, it is interesting that the Chief Minister, as the then Leader of the Opposition and the then Opposition spokesperson on health matters, again and again said to Mr Berry and to Mr Connolly, "Of course I can manage better. You have to do this and you have to do that". She would certainly not have accepted from them an excuse that they had got their model - - -

Mrs Carnell: We did not push censure motions on these sorts of things.

Mr Humphries: She did not move a censure motion when they blew out the budget.

MR MOORE: Indeed, censure motions were not a tool that was used by the Opposition at that stage, and I have various views about whether that was correct or not correct. I have said to Mr Berry and Mr Whitecross, and I think I have said publicly, that censure motions have been used too often in this house, which is why I have voted to defeat a number of them, and that they have been devalued on particularly serious matters.

Another issue that Mrs Carnell raised as part of her defence was the notion that a series of old bills for $1.8m had come in. She was still going to make a $2m saving on VMOs, but that $2m saving was effectively - - -

Mrs Carnell: No, I did not say that. I said "about $200,000".

MR MOORE: Okay. I misunderstood. It was $200,000.

Mrs Carnell: So there would be some savings, but next year there is a capacity to make the whole lot.

MR MOORE: So for this year a $200,000 saving and next year a capacity of about $1.8m as well. Perhaps it is the way I expressed it. My understanding was that there was an extra $1.8m in bills coming in this year.

Mrs Carnell: That is right.

MR MOORE: That is how I meant it. There was an extra $1.8m of saving, which basically is close enough to the $2m she indicated that she was saving. In fact, she had made the saving, except that it was all used up, effectively, by these extra bills that had come in and that had not been accounted for. I am surprised that Mrs Carnell did not then come into the chamber and say, "This is what happened. We are still making our savings, but I am going to spend those savings on the bills from before that have come in". There is a question over that.

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