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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (5 November) . . Page.. 3605 ..

MRS CARNELL: I move:

(1) Paragraph (1), after "John Howard" omit "and,", substitute "and the Leader of the Opposition Mr Wayne Berry".

(2) Paragraph (2), omit "the federal government", substitute "the current and previous federal governments".

MR MOORE (11.19): It is with pleasure that I rise to speak on this particular motion. Mr Berry, in this house on a number of occasions, although not recently, has used the term "putting the blowtorch to the chest". That describes the sort of pressure that has been put on Wayne Berry since he put out a press release on 2 September about Labor's push to get back to the issues that affect Canberrans' everyday lives. The irony is that we have not seen anything from Labor about the push to get back to the issues affecting Canberrans' everyday lives. We have not seen anything about rebuilding the economy; we have not seen anything about creating jobs; we have not seen anything about giving our children higher-quality education and maintaining the quality of life that we have enjoyed in Canberra. We have not seen anything at all from Mr Berry on those things. That is the reality. Instead, he said, "We are not going to have anything to do with euthanasia. We are not going to have anything to do with the heroin trial".

If that had been all Mr Berry had said, it would have been fine, but we should judge him personally by his actions. He set up a conflict in this Territory to ensure that there was not a bipartisan approach to dealing with illicit drugs. I want to give the specific example about safe injecting rooms. Mr Berry was invited, along with other members and police officers, to meet in a round table conference on safe injecting rooms.

Mr Berry: I am not a member of the coalition, Michael.

MR MOORE: You are not a sensible member of the community either. A stack of community groups were there as well, Mr Berry, trying to work out whether or not we could deal with this issue in a bipartisan way - not outcomes, but just whether we could deal with it in a bipartisan way. We sat around a table. Mr Osborne was there; the Greens were there; community groups were there. We did not come to any conclusions. We had raised the issue, the police had raised a number of concerns and we said, "We will go to the next step and then we will come back to the meeting".

In the meantime, Mr Berry makes the whole issue very public and says, "What is this about" - he did not say "safe injecting rooms" - "shooting galleries all over the place?".

Mr Berry: Put the legislation forward.

MR MOORE: Even now he says, "Put the legislation forward". Indeed, that may be necessary, but it might not be necessary to have it. We were prepared to sit around and discuss the issue first. Mr Berry, of course, has called for that on a number of occasions.

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