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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2295 ..

MR OSBORNE (continuing):

shooting gallery legislation and lost, and I admit to a great deal of personal disappointment about that. Such is the nature of the democratic process. However, I also consider it to be a credible part of that democratic process to feel under no obligation to support the shooting funding. I am comfortable with letting those who voted for the legislation be the ones to vote for its funding. Some Assembly members and certain supposedly enlightened members of the media have criticised this position in recent days as somehow being unprincipled. Naturally, I disagree.

This morning, Mr Speaker, I heard both Mr Stanhope and Ms Tucker refer to funding the shooting gallery as a minor matter. I think Mr Stanhope used the description, "a tiny thing and therefore of little or no significance". It may be insignificant to them, but not to me.

Setting aside the fact that I have a major difficulty in funding an activity that would still be illegal, I find it more than a little amusing and highly hypocritical for me and Mr Rugendyke to be labelled as unprincipled for sticking to what we believe in, while other members are willing to temporarily set aside their principles for the sake of expediency and somehow consider that they have retained their integrity. What a joke you are. At least I only have one set of principles that I work from and not a selection from which I pick and choose in order to suit my circumstances. I think it is about high time you woke up to the notion that those who disagree with you might hold their opinions just as strongly as you do.

Mr Speaker, whatever actions I take today, I do so as an Assembly member who has just one vote. The weight that other members place on that vote is up to them.

MR STEFANIAK (Minister for Education) (6.04): Mr Speaker, I want to put a few things on the record. Whilst I certainly respect the opinions and the sincerity of the point put by Mr Rugendyke, and also by Mr Osborne, if I read him correctly, and whilst I also agree with their views on the shooting gallery, I do not think the path Mr Rugendyke has indicated he will go along is the correct one in the circumstances. I say that for a number of reasons. In a democracy, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. In a democracy, sometimes events occur that you would rather not see. Nevertheless, a democracy, I think, is the best form of government that mankind has devised to this point in time.

We have a very long history of democracy in Australia. When Mr Rugendyke was speaking I was thinking back to the great debate that occurred in about 1950 when the Menzies government attempted to ban the Communist Party. They went to a referendum on that. At the time the Communist Party was a Stalinist party. It supported the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was run by one of the greatest monsters of all time, Joseph Stalin, a man equally as evil as Adolf Hitler and who ran a regime of the same degree of barbarity as that of Nazi Germany.

Australia, along with the United Nations, was involved in the war in Korea. Our troops were fighting there. We had a number of naval ships and the air force in support. We were fighting communist aggression, backed by Stalin and the Soviet Union. There were acts of sabotage in Australia by certain members of the Communist Party, including one group who managed to do some damage to HMAS Sydney, an aircraft carrier about to depart for Korea. There were strikes, too, which were political.

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