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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (6 November) . . Page.. 3697 ..

Mr Whitecross: He did not choose it for a museum at all.

MR BERRY: And he did not choose it for a museum. John Howard made the decision in relation to that. The museum decision was made by the Howard Government.

Mr Whitecross: But John Howard hates Aboriginals. He would not want an Aboriginal museum.

MR SPEAKER: Order!

MR BERRY: I do not care who made the decision; it was wrong. But we will have a museum there and we will have to make the most of it. There is no way that we can reverse it. I do not know what will happen to all the exotic trees that are on the site and how we will deal with them in the context of having a new national museum. I suppose that is a debate that will occur at some time in the future. I think the lead-up to the establishment of the museum there will leave something of a long-remembered scar on the ACT community, but there will be positives flowing from it in the context of the museum and all the other buildings that will be placed on the site.

We are yet to see the Government's decision in relation to what they intend to do with the hospice. I think they will probably say, "Oh, well; an agreement was signed under the former Labor Government. It is not our problem that it runs out at some time in the future. What happens to the hospice will be somebody else's worry, not ours". I think that will be another difficult issue for the community to deal with, because it is well known that the hospice has been one of the successes of self-government in the ACT, one of the big success stories, and I am happy to have been associated with it. What happens to the hospice in future is another question, I suppose. Where does it go from there? Nobody from the ACT Government seems to be saying anything, because they do not want to be associated with its closure; but it seems that, as far as the ACT Government is concerned, they do not want to be part of it and they do not want to make any decisions on it. They want to pretend it is somebody else's fault, not theirs. It is their fault; all of it.

Mr Speaker, those are my comments on it. I think the National Museum will, in the end, make a major contribution to the ACT economy, but in many ways the ACT community have paid dearly for the pleasure.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (11.22): Mr Speaker, I seek leave to make a short statement as well on this subject.

Leave granted.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Berry pushes this line every time and every time the facts, unfortunately, come back to haunt him. If we are going to debate the hospital, let us put the facts on the table. At the time that the Alliance Government left office in June 1991 the hospital at Acton was fully functional. There were almost no - - -

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