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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 8 Hansard (28 August) . . Page.. 2618 ..

Mr Berry: You should not be supporting John Howard's policy solidly.

Mr Humphries: Mr Speaker, I can barely hear what the Chief Minister is saying and I am sitting right next to her. It is appropriate that the standing orders in this place provide protection for members when they are addressing the Assembly. The Chief Minister has been seeking that protection all afternoon. I think she deserves it.

MR SPEAKER: The next person to interject will be warned. I am warning all members.

MRS CARNELL: That includes points of order, Mr Speaker. I have not finished the answer yet, Mr Speaker. The Government is very disappointed that the officials of the Department of Finance saw fit not to short-list the proposal from CanDeliver. Those opposite think it is funny. They would have done nothing, Mr Speaker. CanDeliver, without doubt, is one of the most innovative approaches, I think, ever taken by government anywhere to get in there and use our risk profile, our credit rating, to help small businesses.

Mr Speaker, I am also concerned about the total insensitivity and very discourteous manner in which the notification of the decision was managed. The parties involved were actually informed before the Government was, Mr Speaker. That is the level of the problem we had here. We will be doing everything in our power to ensure that in the future CanDeliver is successful. We believe that ours was a good proposal. We believe that we have very positive potential outcomes for the ACT community in the future. It is frustrating to see that the staff of the Department of Finance do not recognise the merit of the CanDeliver concept. I wonder, Mr Speaker, whether those opposite believe that somehow the CanDeliver document or the CanDeliver bid was not up to scratch. Is that what they are saying? I think that is what they are saying.

Mr Whitecross: That is what the Department of Finance is saying.

Mr Wood: It was not us.

MR SPEAKER: Order! There will be no rhetorical questions.

MRS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, possibly they could ask the chair of CanDeliver what he thinks. The chair, Mr Speaker, is David Lamont.

MR WOOD: My question is to Mr Humphries, the Minister for Police, who seems to me to be the one up and down all the time creating a disturbance. Mr Humphries, given your apparent uncertainty, evidenced in your answers to questions over the past couple of days, as to whether the Australian Federal Police is providing the number of police required by its contract with the ACT Government, can you inform the Assembly what processes are included in that contract to ensure that the Territory actually gets what it pays for? Does the ACT Government have any idea on any one day of how many of the police it contracts from the AFP are actually available for duty?

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