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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (3 December) . . Page.. 4470 ..

Ms McRae: I had to go and speak to you. Do not give me that rubbish.

MRS CARNELL: What I say is absolutely true. Mr Speaker, if those opposite have had problems for the last three years with the approach that you have taken, as Mr Whitecross indicated in his speech, then you wonder why they left it to the second last week of the Assembly to make any comments about it. That is really the bottom line here.

If it is about Mr Berry being suspended from the Assembly, then the entity that is responsible for that is this Assembly. It was done on a vote of this Assembly. If it is, as Mr Whitecross suggested, an ongoing problem that they have with the approach that you have taken as Speaker, then I do not believe that they were doing their job if they did not bring that up long before now. I do not believe that that was the problem. Mr Speaker, we have not seen any indication until now that those opposite have had a problem with your approach. In every Assembly, there is some questioning of particular rulings. That always happens. It happened with Ms McRae. What we are seeing here is another effort to keep us sitting till midnight again. If that is what we have to do, we will do it. There is no doubt about that. What we are seeing is a little bit of preciousness and timewasting.

MS TUCKER (4.51): Mr Corbell seemed to be under the impression that I did not take this seriously. I do. I was shaking my head because I was disagreeing with something he said. It was not that I do not take it seriously. I do. I find it quite difficult that we are spending this much time on this issue. I am not convinced that what Labor is doing is a result of a long-term concern. If it is, then I am sorry I have not heard about it before. I would have been interested in discussing it. I have not actually been contacted by the Opposition to hear them express concerns about how the Speaker has been managing question time.

I was just talking to Ms Horodny and reflecting on how we feel about interjections against us, and we agreed that in our experience interjections and harassment in this place come from the Labor side more than any other side. We are told that it is robust debate. I am not convinced by that, although I seem to be outnumbered. Most people here seem to think interjections are robust debate. I think they are often harassment. I think they are designed to put people off. We live with that, and we just keep doing our work. If that is the protocol that is accepted here, so be it.

In certain situations interjections are not seen as appropriate and if there are too many the Speaker will call for order. Mr Corbell sees it as very unfair that Labor is called to order much more often, but I would suggest that it is because they behave in a way that requires them to be called to order more often. It is logical that that would be the case. Ms Horodny has been warned on one occasion. This morning Mr Kaine objected to some slight interjections I was making, and I was prepared to take that on board. If he did not want me to do that, I was not going to do it. I do not like interjection a lot. I do not think it often helps the debate. I often hear Ms McRae say, "That is rubbish. Get away with you". How does that enhance debate? If that is what people want to do, then it has to be kept in order, and that is the role of the Speaker. You feel a bit like children. If you draw the line in the sand, then you have to know that that line has been drawn.

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