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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 3 Hansard (9 April) . . Page.. 782 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Sixty thousand dollars was put into the venture, but only $20,000 of that came from the ACT; $40,000 of that was from the Commonwealth. Obviously, the Commonwealth was satisfied enough about this process to put that amount of money in. I maintain that that was an appropriate process to have gone through.

MRS LITTLEWOOD: I refer my question to the Attorney-General. It relates to comments made by Mr Wood on the agreement reached with the Commonwealth on legal aid. Mr Wood claimed that the ACT may be a big loser under the agreement. Can the Attorney-General explain to the Assembly what the agreement he announced in early March will actually mean for the ACT?

MR HUMPHRIES: I thank Mrs Littlewood for that question. It appears that not only are we to be attacked for those things that go wrong; we are actually to be attacked for those things that go right. The legal aid debate, or conflict, between the Commonwealth and the ACT is a matter which I do not think I need to tell any member in this place about. Throughout this debate members were briefed by me fairly fully on what was going on. They know what kind of problems the ACT had in pressing its case to the Commonwealth. They know, I hope, that the ACT ultimately was successful in that fight, and we succeeded in having a substantial increase in funding for legal aid in the ACT.

This Government has achieved the largest infusion of funding for legal aid since self-government. I have nothing to apologise or express regret about in that. When the announcement about the successful resolution about negotiation was made, Mr Wood, the shadow Attorney-General, issued a media release that said:

The joint statement by Mr Humphries and his federal counterpart Daryl Williams states that "the agreement will provide for maintenance of legal aid expenditure on commonwealth cases at 95/96 levels".

If this is the case the ACT will receive $2.36m, an increase of only $260,000 on the commonwealth's first offer.

Mr Wood: If this is the case.

MR HUMPHRIES: It was the case, but that was not the amount we were going to receive, Mr Wood.

Mr Wood: Because you went into semantics; that is why.

MR HUMPHRIES: No. You were wrong; you were wrong; you were wrong. The expenditure on Commonwealth cases in 1995-96 was $3.006m, not $2.36m. You got your - - -

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