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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 8 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 2442 ..

Mr Moore: Mr Osborne has not said a word.

Mr Osborne: I have not said anything.

MS TUCKER: I am making a general comment here, Mr Moore. It is quite out of kilter with what we have done. We are, I state again, the most deregulated area. This is a small section of regulation to counter the problems that everybody in this place has acknowledged.

MR BERRY (12.38 am): Mr Speaker, I accept that Ms Tucker and her colleague Ms Horodny are committed to the cause of the Greens, but on this issue it does not achieve what you want. I think you must have said that you were going to support the legislation before you read it because it does not do what you want it to do.

Mr Moore: And what your policy says.

MR BERRY: And what your policy says. It is a silly notion to support legislation that does not do what you want it to do, and, what is more, legislation that just gets you into trouble. That is the nature of this legislation. The shallowness of it is shown up by this silly sunset clause which is designed to get the Liberals off the hook. It would not be hard to imagine circumstances where the Liberals, having a look around the Assembly, put up this proposal thinking, "Oh, nobody will cop this. We will look as though we have done our best for those people with the save our shops campaign. We had our investment in that and they have had their campaign. Nobody will support what we are up to". Who would, on the face of it?

Out of the blue, the Greens, bearing in mind that they have a fervent commitment to more deregulation in the group centres and so on, have misread the legislation, in my view, and then said that they would support it because it somehow gets them close to their own policy. Well, it gets them further away from their own policy because it damages the people they are trying to protect.

Mr Moore: And they were cornered. That is how the Liberals got cornered.

MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Berry has the floor. If you want to have a talk, go outside.

MR BERRY: Mr Moore, I do not have the luxury of the time that Independents have to think about conspiracy theories and Greens and so on, but I have to say that in the few years that I have been in this Assembly I have picked up the formula. I think I am onto something. I would urge everybody to dump this silly amendment and dump the legislation. It just does not help anybody.

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