Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1654 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

it for years. There are all these issues about what we do with the ACTEW arrangements that are out there now, the power grid and all those sorts of things which will cost millions and millions of dollars to relocate. At the end of the day the ACT gets the job of doing all the hard work and it will be a long time into the future before there are many jobs created. I tell you what, a lot of us will have long departed this place by the time much happens on the Kingston site.

Mr Speaker, for Mrs Carnell to harp about the loss of jobs in the immediate sense is a bit of a joke. With her record, I would not mention jobs. In fact, I would drop the word right out of my vocabulary because of the poor record. Under Labor we had unemployment going down. Under the Liberals we now have a situation where 2,300 extra people are on the unemployed list since Mrs Carnell became Chief Minister. There is no way of avoiding it.

Mr Humphries: It went up, Wayne.

MR BERRY: Yes, of course it went up under Mrs Carnell. I agree with you, Mr Humphries. It went up by 2,300 people.

Mr Speaker, I think this report is to be commended. The Government should follow it to the letter and should congratulate the committee, as my colleague said, for providing it with a good set of terms of reference upon which it should operate in dealing with both of those sites. The community now recognises that this deal was a bad deal and that much more could have been achieved if we had had a good negotiator who knew something about these matters dealing with Commonwealth officials. As I said earlier, you can always see a sucker when they are coming. I am afraid that we have been suckered into a deal on this issue which the ACT will long pay for, but I think the committee report provides something of a solution to many of the problems Mrs Carnell has brought to us.

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister) (11.38): Mr Speaker, I think I have to start my speech by quoting a piece from Michael Lee's press release. For those who have some memory of this deal, they might remember that it was conducted between a Federal Labor government and my Government, at their instigation, interestingly. The deal was announced by Michael Lee, the Minister responsible at that time. Towards the bottom of that press release Michael Lee said that the deal that was being negotiated by the previous Government had now been completed by the new Carnell Government. That tends to fly in the face of all of the comments we have heard from those opposite, Mr Speaker. Michael Lee, the then Labor Minister, indicated that negotiations for the land swap had been going on under the previous Government.

To some extent, Mr Wood made some comments along those lines. He said that three to four years ago he had been thinking about it and he thought that there might be a few problems. Maybe negotiations started three to four years ago, but what actually happened, Mr Speaker? Mr Berry has indicated that Michael Lee, the Labor Minister involved at that stage, may not have been totally accurate. That is interesting, because I did not mention that at the time, and the press release was a quite public document.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .