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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 5 Hansard (10 May) . . Page.. 1357 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

I ask members to consider whether this information is going to help the ACT and what precedent this will set. I ask them to consider what will not be disclosable in the future merely because a member of the Assembly says, "I want the information."

MR BERRY (12.25): Mr Humphries posed the question: what has changed? Well, quite a bit has changed. In the first place, no previous government that has ever graced self-government in the ACT has ever had a record like this lot. Mr Humphries and Ms Carnell bleat about the fact that they were not able to get access to information from previous Labor governments because-

Members interjecting-

MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Berry has the floor.

MR BERRY: They never bothered to move a motion and they never had the numbers to do it. And the circumstances were quite different. No previous government in this place ever had a futsal slab to start with. That was the start of the rot. And then, of course, we went to the disastrous Acton and Kingston land swap which cost this territory so much, the hospice and the costs that that has imposed on the territory, the hospital implosion that left one of our citizens dead-

Mr Humphries: Mr Speaker-

MR SPEAKER: Order! Just a moment please.

Mr Humphries: Mr Speaker, I know that Mr Berry likes to go through this speech every time he rises to his feet on whatever subject. It is not related to what is before the Assembly today.

MR BERRY: No, this is entirely related.

MR SPEAKER: Thank you. Relevance, Mr Berry, please.

MR BERRY: Mr Humphries asked the question, "What has changed?" What has changed is that we have a government which has left footpaths in the political landscape littered with financial disasters. That is what we have got in front of us now. We have a community that questions every move this government makes-the hospital implosion that left one of our fair citizens killed, the Hall/Kinlyside disaster, and, of course, the disastrous Bruce Stadium about which we have yet to discover all the facts. Those are the things that have changed and that is why it is incumbent upon the Labor opposition to discover all of the information. It is in the public interest for the community to fully understand what this government has been up to.

A little while ago I saw a press report which indicated that the government would be only too happy to give us all of the information. But all of a sudden they are struggling, and the pain and suffering they are going through to stop us getting the information belies those earlier claims.

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