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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (14 May) . . Page.. 1357 ..

MR SPEAKER: Order! If people want to speak they can get on their feet and do it formally.

MR HUMPHRIES: Obviously, you cannot make deals with these people over there, Mr Speaker. Then we had the request, which we readily agreed to, to put the legislation through on Tuesday afternoon of this week. The request from the Opposition Whip was to pass the legislation on Tuesday afternoon. We agreed to it. We said, "Okay; if you want to do it on Tuesday afternoon, we will do it". There was no sign of the legislation. They said, "We have changed our mind again; we want to do it on Wednesday now".

Mr Stefaniak: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: I wonder whether you could call Opposition members to order. I have been trying to listen for the last two minutes, and I am hearing more of them than I am of the Minister. They are drowning him out.

MR SPEAKER: I uphold the point of order.

Mr Moore: You are right, Mr Speaker; they should be quiet so that we can hear how embarrassed Gary is.

MR HUMPHRIES: I am not embarrassed at all, Mr Speaker. I am quite proud to point out that we have at least been prepared to put our cards on the table and make it clear what we are going to do. It is quite false to suggest that the Government was not going to support the Labor Party's Bill. We made it clear on Thursday, the day we announced this change of policy, that we would support the legislation. I think Mr Whitecross's duplicity in pretending that there was not going to be Government support for his legislation is exposed for what it was.

Mr Speaker, I do not rise in this place in any way embarrassed by having attempted to assist small business, particularly small business in local centres in this city. The fact remains, as I said at the outset of my speech, that there is still a serious social problem in this city. If local centres in the suburbs continue to decline, as they had in the three or four years prior to the enactment of our legislation, then Canberra will be the poorer for that loss. There are already suburbs in this city that do not have local shops and do not have access to services which, for a number of people in our community, are very important. I refer to the elderly; those with a lack of mobility; parents of young children who are at home and with no cars; people who depend, in various ways, on those centres as a source of social interaction. If those local centres die, then we are all the poorer for it. I make no apologies for having attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to reverse the decline of those centres through legislation such as that which is now being repealed.

Mr Speaker, those opposite can crow about seeing the Government do a backflip. I will say to them that, if at any stage the Government believes it has made a mistake, it ought to have the strength of character, collectively, to acknowledge that mistake; and we are doing that today. We deserve to get credit for that, although we obviously will not, from those opposite. But I believe that the people of the ACT respect that, although what occurred was not popular, it was motivated in a way which was intended to protect a number of people in the community who are vulnerable. That, Mr Speaker, is something that I make no apology for having tried to do.

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