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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 5 Hansard (25 August) . . Page.. 1217 ..

Mr Rugendyke: On the point of order, Mr Speaker: I think it is important to hear the entirety of this debate. It is a serious issue. I would like to hear whatever the Chief Minister has in defence of what Mr Stanhope is saying happened.

MR SPEAKER: Thank you.

Mr Berry: Mr Speaker, Mr Rugendyke should consult the standing orders before he speaks. The fact of the matter is that one is required to be relevant in these debates. The relevance has to be to the point of whether the Chief Minister misled us or did not. She attempts to wander off into some other area which has nothing at all to do with the misleading.

Mr Kaine: Mr Speaker, I would like to speak to this point of order. I am happy to hear what the Chief Minister has to say in connection with something that a former Labor government did some years ago if she can establish the link and establish that it justifies the way the Government is acting today. Unless she can establish that link I think it is irrelevant.

Mr Osborne: Mr Speaker, I wish to speak to this point of order as well. I, like Mr Rugendyke, am happy to hear whatever the Chief Minister has to say, but the issue for me is whether or not the Chief Minister and the Deputy Chief Minister deliberately misled. That is the issue, Mr Speaker. I am not particularly interested in the development or the proposal, or even Harcourt Hill. What I am interested in is what they said and whether it was deliberate or reckless.

MR SPEAKER: Mr Kaine's point of order is that the Chief Minister must show some sort of link between Harcourt Hill and Kinlyside in order to discuss or to defend the Government's position on this censure motion. I do not uphold Mr Berry's point of order on this matter, but I ask you to bring the link together. Otherwise I must uphold the views of the crossbenchers that - - -

Mr Kaine: You mean the other crossbenchers, Mr Speaker.

MR SPEAKER: The other crossbenchers, Mr Kaine, thank you. Yes. So would you be guided, please, Chief Minister.

MS CARNELL: Absolutely, Mr Speaker. Mr Stanhope spent quite a considerable time talking about the process that the Government went through to get to a stage of a preliminary agreement. I was comparing the process that we went through with a process used by those opposite, which I think is very relevant in this particular circumstance, Mr Speaker. What we have shown here is the process that we went through to get to a preliminary agreement. We set in place a number of very high hurdles for Mr Whitcombe and Hall Rural Estate to get through if we were to enter into a joint venture agreement, which, of course, did not happen. What I am showing here, Mr Speaker, is that those opposite did not set the same hurdles at all. In fact, in September 1992, Fearons Brennan, a firm of chartered accountants, was engaged by the then Department of the Environment, Land and Planning - I think Mr Bill Wood was the Minister - to assess the proposed financial arrangements put forward by Cygnet.

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