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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 6 Hansard (3 September) . . Page.. 1906 ..

MR SPEAKER (continuing):

Standing order 180 sets down the order in which this Bill will be considered; that is, in the detail stage, any Schedule expressing the services for which the appropriation is to be made must be considered before the clauses and, unless the Assembly otherwise orders, the Schedules will be considered by proposed expenditure in the order shown. I remind members that we have previously agreed to consider Schedule 1 by part, appropriation unit and departmental totals, then the clauses prior to Schedule 2 and the title.

Part 13 - ACT Forests

Proposed expenditure - ACT Forests, $840,000 (comprising capital injection, $840,000)

MR CORBELL (3.41): Mr Speaker, in moving to the appropriation unit ACT Forests, the most notable thing that emerged in the Estimates Committee hearing on ACT Forests was something which actually had nothing to do with ACT Forests because it was a tennis match. Mr Speaker, I am afraid that that says a lot about what exactly is going on in this Government. The Estimates Committee was very surprised to learn that ACT Forests had sponsored a tennis match in Canberra - a tennis match between the two Woodies, as they are known.

Ms Carnell: It was really good too.

MR CORBELL: The Chief Minister says, "It was really good". I was not there so I do not know whether it was really good. I am not much of a tennis aficionado myself. I would not think foresters would be tennis aficionados either, at least in their professional capacity, Mr Speaker, but obviously they are. What was most concerning was that, when we discovered that ACT Forests had sponsored this tennis match and we asked why, the answer we received was even more extraordinary than the fact that ACT Forests was sponsoring a tennis match in the first place; and that was, there was an obvious connection between Woodies, trees and forests.

Ms Carnell: There is.

MR CORBELL: What an incredibly astute and devastating use of intellect to bring together that answer. Does the Government consider members of the Estimates Committee to be fools? More importantly, does the Government consider members of the community to be fools? It is an absolutely absurd suggestion that ACT Forests would somehow benefit because the tennis players were called the Woodies and ACT Forests obviously grew trees. Mr Speaker, it is a bizarre justification.

Mr Wood: It is a pathetic excuse.

MR CORBELL: As my colleague Mr Wood points out, it is even more than that; it is a pathetic excuse. Mr Wood, you are quite right to say that.

Obviously the Estimates Committee was not prepared to accept this excuse and this justification from the Department of Urban Services and the people at ACT Forests, so we further asked, "What were the circumstances that surrounded this occurring in the first place? How did this come about?". We soon discovered that what had actually

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