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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 9 Hansard (28 August) . . Page.. 2694 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

Let us look at the next part of the question, and that is: What is going to happen in the future? What if someone comes up with a proposal? I gave a reasonably detailed answer, effectively saying, "Highly unlikely. Yes, but highly unlikely".

Mr Berry: "I do not think I could possibly reject that out of hand ... I am certainly not going to reject that out of hand", you said.

MR STEFANIAK: Indeed. I went on to say:

... we would have to look at any proposal very carefully before we went any further.

That is right, Mr Berry.

Mr Berry: So we did not reject it out of hand, did we?

MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Stefaniak is answering the question.

MR STEFANIAK: Right. I went into a number of problems with it, Mr Speaker. How on earth they can take this amazing quantum jump is completely beyond me, Mr Speaker. Really, here we have a case of fabricating a wonderful little story just for the sake of getting a little bit of media coverage. Mr Speaker, that is pretty irresponsible. It is incorrect as well. What I would like to say to the media today, Mr Hird, you having raised this point, is this: You had better check the facts when you get a release from the Opposition. If you see anything with an ALP letterhead, treat it with extreme caution because you know that there could well be some very erroneous statements appearing there.

Mr Speaker, let us go back about 12 months. This is the 12-month anniversary of some amazing claims that Ms McRae's Opposition colleague Mr Berry made that we were going to sell off Namadgi National Park. Maybe it has something to do with full moons. That was a very busy time for the Opposition because, apart from us selling off Namadgi National Park, they also claimed we were going to slash and burn public sector jobs, inflict savage decreases to the sports budget, which actually turned out to be one of the best since self-government - - -

Mrs Carnell: Sell the Canberra Theatre. That was one.

MR STEFANIAK: Sell the Canberra Theatre - you are quite right, Mrs Carnell - and the Nolan Gallery. All of these were wrong, just like this latest classic about selling schools. Then we had another great gaffe, and that was the infamous loss of the pre-Olympic training to the Newcastle University. When the university denied this claim it was discovered that, once again, the story had originated from someone in the ACT ALP. The Olympic theme continued only a few weeks ago when the welcome home parade was going to be a huge embarrassment and it was said that we had lost ground on getting Olympic sports to the ACT. I am sure the 20,000 people reported to be at the parade really hung their heads low.

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