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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1658 ..

MR WOOD: Mr Speaker, I would like to raise an issue of misrepresentation under the standing orders.

MR SPEAKER: Under standing order 47?

MR WOOD: Yes, thank you. The Chief Minister says that we could not come to a conclusion in dealing with the Commonwealth Government. The fact is that the then Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett, would not do a deal that was not in the interests of the ACT. She would not allow herself to be conned.

MR MOORE (11.52), in reply: I rose slowly, Mr Speaker, because I will be closing the debate and I wanted to ascertain whether any other members wanted to speak. I think the nub of Mrs Carnell's argument is that the Acton Peninsula is worth $1 and Kingston is worth a lot of money, and therefore we should get on with Kingston; that it took us 12 months to realise that this is the case and that is all that we are doing. What absolute nonsense! The Chief Minister has concentrated entirely on what we could be doing on the Kingston foreshore, as though that is the only part of the issue that the committee considered.

Mrs Carnell: We have control over Kingston. We do not have control over Acton.

MR MOORE: I hear her bleating about control. She clearly does not understand where controls lie, where leases lie, and how things are affected. Indeed, Chief Minister, control over the Government Printing Office is one of the issues that we raised with you and that you had not thought about when you made the stupid deal. You say that Acton is worth $1. What absolute nonsense! That actually identifies dry Liberal economics. This Chief Minister tried to convince the electorate that she was not on about dry economics, that she was actually a wet Liberal; but we certainly see it coming through here. If we used the same logic that she is using in terms of this deal, it would be appropriate to nominate $1 as the value of Namadgi National Park because it does not have a dollar value. For purely administrative reasons the Commonwealth Government put a $1 value on it. Anybody who suggests that the Acton Peninsula is effectively valueless would have to have their head read. Indeed, that is what the Chief Minister has said.

The issue that is before us, Mr Speaker, is whether this was a sensible deal. No, it was not a sensible deal. I must say that over the 12 months the committee did not just suddenly come out and say, "We want to do this" or "We want to do that". There was a whole series of recommendations that deal with the failure of the Government to sort out details on this deal, such as their failure to sort out the contamination, their failure to sort out the costs associated with ACTEW's removal, their failure to establish the level of contamination, their failure to deal with the Government Printer, and their failure to get an agreement as to what was going to go on Acton Peninsula, and that is an important part of this issue.

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