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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 1 Hansard (19 February) . . Page.. 117 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

It really beggars description. No, Mr Speaker, I will not indicate any lack of confidence in any magistrate. I do not propose to make an issue of any difference of view, if one exists, between me and a particular magistrate. I have to emphasise that I did not sit in on the case that Mr Ward sat on. I cannot make any judgment about the issues on which His Worship was sitting. That is not a role for anybody in this place - including you, Ms Horodny.

In respect of the suggestion you made to the media today - that I should be instituting prosecutions against Parkwood Eggs - let me also remind you about the processes of justice in this Territory. Attorneys-general and governments do not initiate prosecutions; the Director of Public Prosecutions does. Interference in that process by, for example, a member of a government is entirely illegal and quite improper.

MR BERRY: My question is to the Minister for Urban Services, Mr Kaine. Minister, do you stand by your statement that the reason why ACTION has suffered a drop in patronage levels is that the Federal Government has put off 5,000 public servants, all of whom, according to your reasoning, would have had to be catching buses to and from work? Or was this statement by you, like many of those made by your predecessor, just ill-informed and ill-considered?

MR KAINE: Mr Speaker, there have been a number of reasons bandied about by members of the Opposition as to why the revenues of ACTION are down. They have not produced a jot of evidence to support any one of them. When I was asked the question, I said that one of the reasons why there is a reduction in patronage might well be that there are fewer people who need to travel to work these days because their jobs with the APS have been terminated. I also went on and said that some of them, if they have left town, might even have spouses who no longer need to travel to work in Canberra either. Some of them, if they have left town, may even have had children at school who would no longer need to travel to school. I think that is a reasonable deduction from the fact that a very large number of Commonwealth public servants are no longer employed by the Commonwealth Public Service. I still believe, Mr Berry, that that is a significant factor in the downturn in revenues being experienced by ACTION.

There may be other reasons as well. If you can produce some evidence to sustain your argument that there are other reasons why there is a downturn, put the evidence on the table and we will examine it. It is all very well for you to assert things without producing any evidence at all. There is plenty of evidence to support my contention that one of the reasons for the downturn is that there are fewer people wanting to travel. If you dispute the fact that there are fewer people travelling, why are you making so much noise about all these redundancies that you assert the Commonwealth is imposing on Canberra? On the one hand, you claim that all these people are being made redundant; on the other, you are saying that this has no effect on the ACT economy and no effect, in particular, on ACTION. Your argument is inconsistent.

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