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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 1928 ..

MR WHITECROSS (Leader of the Opposition) (11.09): Mr Speaker, I wanted to just touch on a couple of matters in this debate. First of all, with respect to the Prasad matter, Mr Humphries, as is his wont, was fast and loose with the facts in his explanation of the consultation process under Prasad. It is true that the Labor Party decided that the consultation on the staffing would be done through my office, and that was done. In the course of that consultation, Mr Prasad expressed a particular interest in relation to the staffing appropriate to the Government Whip's office and the Opposition Whip's office. I said to Mr Prasad that he could discuss with Mr Berry the specific functions associated with the Whip's office in order to assess, for himself, the additional workloads associated with that. That was in addition to the information I provided to Mr Prasad about that matter. Mr Prasad did not take up that opportunity; so, it is wrong for Mr Humphries to say that the opportunity was not offered to Mr Prasad.

Mr Speaker, moving on to the issue of security: I share with Ms Tucker a quite extraordinary level of disbelief at the Government's approach to this matter. Having imposed the situation on the Assembly, for the Government to turn around and express dismay at the security arrangements, I think, is quite extraordinary. These security arrangements were not necessary when Labor was in government, because there was sufficient allocation to allow 24-hour guards in the Assembly. The new arrangements were initiated because the Government chose to cut back the allocation to the Assembly. As a result, the Assembly had to close the security doors after hours and had to implement new security arrangements. I think it is pretty hypocritical of the Government, who made the cut, to do what they like to do and say, "We made the cut, but the decision on how to implement the cut was made by the managers. It is not our fault". No-one buys that. That is a hypocritical position, and the Government has to accept responsibility for the cuts that are made.

Having said that, Mr Speaker, I have to say I receive people in my office all the time; constituents and lobbyists of various kinds come to my office. None of them have ever had any difficulty getting into my office, I have to say. They have always received the full cooperation of the attendants in accessing my office, and I just have not experienced the kinds of difficulties that the Government are claiming that they have had with the new security arrangements. I think the Secretariat are to be congratulated for the way that they have implemented the arrangements and the way that they have adjusted to take account of the changes that have been suggested by members of the Assembly and their staff. I think they have done a very good job.

Mr Speaker, my greatest disappointment in this whole debate is that in the Second Assembly, when Roberta McRae was the Speaker of the Assembly and I was working for her, we worked hard to win an extra allocation for the Assembly to improve the arrangements for the Assembly to make it easier for Assembly members to do their job. We won an additional allocation of the order of $300,000 for the Assembly from the then Chief Minister, Rosemary Follett. Under this Government that $300,000 has been taken back. The Government which talks about council-style government, the Government which talks about the importance of the committee process, the Government which talks about being more in touch with the community, has gone in and wound back the progress that was made under the previous Labor Government, cut the allocation to the Assembly

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