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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 5 Hansard (15 May) . . Page.. 1322 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

Mrs Carnell yesterday referred to "letters". Yet, when she was asked to table the letters, she denied that she had ever referred to them; and instead produced a minute from Mr Townsend as her only evidence, and produced that minute only after debate about her producing the papers. Today we had to get to the stage of suspending standing orders to get Mrs Carnell to part with what she said were the letters but which turned out, instead, to be a single letter about a draft agreement. It was certainly not what Mrs Carnell had talked about in her answer to the question the day before, where she talked about letters confirming that it had always been the case that negotiations were going on about a clean-up.

This ought to be a source of concern to all members, particularly given the fact that this Assembly has prided itself on the very highest standards of disclosure by governments to the Assembly - a function, I might suggest, of minority government. Nevertheless, a few years ago, we recall, a member of the Labor Party was censured; a no-confidence motion was passed on the basis that he had misled the Assembly by failing to disclose information which he knew might be relevant but which no-one had ever asked for.

Yet this Government, which was only too happy to hand out the treatment then, and its supporters seem to be rather sanguine about an approach by this Chief Minister where you do not answer questions when they are asked; you repeatedly do not answer questions when they are asked in question time; when you refer to documents you refuse to table them; you say that you are going to table them and then table something which is not what you referred to. This is the very lowest standard of behaviour by this Government.

This is the consistent pattern of this Government: They talk big, but they deliver small. This Acton-Kingston swap is a classic example of the Government talking big and delivering small. Mrs Carnell argues that this Kingston foreshore development is going to be the solution to the unemployment problems being created at the moment by the Howard Government. Yet we have a situation where Mrs Carnell cannot even give us a simple and open disclosure in relation to the question of who is paying to clean up the contamination. She ventures legal opinions about the self-government Act; she refers to letters which she will not table; she tables draft agreements in lieu of that; and we are expected to believe, and the Canberra community is expected to be reassured, that somehow or other this Kingston development is going to be the panacea for the evils being visited on the ACT community by the Howard Government at the moment and is going to create a boom in employment for us.

The consistent theme is this: It is always somebody else's fault; it is always someone else's problem. We know one thing for sure about this contamination. There is a lot of it, and it is either the developer's problem or the Commonwealth Government's problem; but it is never Mrs Carnell's problem. Well, the community out there know that, notwithstanding what Mrs Carnell says, it is their problem. She has done a dud deal for this Territory, and they are the ones who are going to be paying for the clean-up of the contamination.

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