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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (30 June) . . Page.. 1845 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

I am writing this letter to record, in a form that you may use as you see fit, that I will neither mount nor support any challenge to your leadership of the ACT parliamentary party at any time during the life of the first Assembly.

There is a signature on the bottom of that. The same signature appears on the bottom of the letter that was issued the other week. Anybody who reads history knows that that undertaking was not worth the paper it was written on, and anybody who knows that rule will also know that the same signature on the bottom of the piece of paper that was distributed last week is not worth the paper it was written on. I can assure those who have some doubts about that that they need not worry because, as a certain colleague of mine said to me only yesterday, "When the Chief Minister goes, there are two members sitting there loyally alongside of her and they will dislocate their shoulders getting their arms up". Both of them signed the piece of paper the other day.

Mr Speaker, I am coming to the conclusion. I have been having a good time just recapitulating what has happened so far, but I would like to refer to some of the things that Mrs Carnell said in her speech in defence. She said, "We did not set out deliberately to break the law; we did not knowingly set out to break the law". I think that matter has been dealt with sufficiently this afternoon. It is not a prerequisite that you deliberately or knowingly set out to break the law - if you did, that would make it more serious - but I think it has been pretty well established, and Mr Osborne has addressed the point, that that is no defence.

Mrs Carnell said, "What we are talking about here is only about guidelines that were not issued". That is not the case at all. Even if it did only deal with the guidelines, the guidelines that were issued have to be legal. They would have had to have had the effect of turning Bruce Stadium into an investment. The Auditor-General has questioned that, and Professor Richardson has shot it out of the water. So this is not just about guidelines that were not issued. The issue goes much deeper than that.

The Chief Minister also came up with a new definition of "appropriation". She said, "It does not have to be appropriated, it can be authorised". She referred, interestingly enough, to a standing appropriation. She referred to section 7 of the Financial Management Act and said, "I can spend money under a standing appropriation". But it is not an appropriation that is an authorisation. If she had read section 7 of the Financial Management Act she would have known that for this purpose the Financial Management Act is in fact an appropriating Bill, because the first sentence of that clause says:

So this Act is, in itself, an Appropriation Bill for supply and it places some conditions on what that supply money can be used for; so it is, in fact, an appropriation, and the word "authorisation" does not appear anywhere in the Financial Management Act. "Authorise" or "authorisation" simply does not exist. So the Chief Minister is way off track on that matter again, and, of course, that supply Bill has to be validated by a subsequent Appropriation Bill anyway.

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