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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2215 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

Because it is a concrete slab and it is built in the open, the surface has to comply with safety standards for normal footpaths. This means it has to be non-slip. This means that if you are playing an indoor game on an outdoor slab and you slide, as you do in indoor soccer, you leave lots of skin on the slab. So the government had to buy a little toupee for the baldy pate of the slab and had to put in a mat. That cost $30,000, on my recollection of it. And it just goes on and on. (Quorum formed.) How many games have been played since? More of them have been played indoors than outdoors, for good reasons. The surfaces indoors are more suited for the game. Downpours of rain do not stop play.

Ms Carnell: I take a point of order, Mr Speaker. I would be interested in the relevance of this. The futsal slab, from my memory, was built in 1996. We are not debating that budget.

MR BERRY: This is more about style, Mr Speaker.

MR SPEAKER: If you can direct it to that point-

MR BERRY: I know it is stinging. It must hurt, Mrs Carnell, but the community deserve to be reminded about these things. It is, after all, the community who will decide next time who will run this place. I might return, for a moment-

Mr Moore: Like they did last time. This is the same thing you said last time.

MR BERRY: Mr Moore interjects. Mr Moore tells us publicly that he has not made up his mind yet whether he will run at the next election or not. I hope he does, because I want to watch it.

MR SPEAKER: Order! Let us get back to some relevance to the Chief Minister's Department.

MR BERRY: I would like to deal also with how this government got there. They claim that they got there because they were elected. They never got there because of that at all. They got there because the crossbenchers put them there. It is the crossbenchers who will decide their future.

Mr Moore: They got there because you led Labor to the lowest vote ever.

MR BERRY: Commit yourself to running now, Michael. I want to watch it. There are other issues that have to be dealt with as well. One is the Floriade fee. Floriade this year, we are told, will have an entrance fee of $5. This is closer to the fee that should have been established in the first place, and we would not have seen this fantastic festival brought to its knees by the mismanagement of this government. Floriade may well redeem itself as a result of the position that has been taken in relation to the fee this time round. But it is yet to be explained to those people who over many years built Floriade-that is, the Canberra taxpayers-why it is they have to pay twice. If Canberrans had been treated with respect in the first place, that festival would not have found itself in the state that it did because of this government's administration.

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