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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (10 July) . . Page.. 2374 ..
MR HUMPHRIES: You can giggle in your usual way across there, pretend that you are all very relaxed and happy about outcomes here and say that this is none of the doing of the Labor Party, while washing your hands, Pilate-like, in a dish, but the reality is that the people opposite put their SIP at risk by the approach that they took-
Mr Stanhope: Our SIP!
MR HUMPHRIES: The SIP that you, to a man, support. You put it at risk by the behaviour that you displayed last Thursday week and now you are surprised when you find out that the thing has been dumped or deferred.
Mr Stanhope: It was dumped, was it?
Mr Wood: Your argument is not working.
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, those opposite have asked already in this debate for the protection of standing orders and I think that, at the same time, they deserve to respect standing orders when it comes to interjections.
Let me go through some of the events of the last few days to put things in perspective. We all know that on Thursday night of the week before last the Assembly met-
Mr Moore: Friday morning.
MR HUMPHRIES: In fact, to be more precise, in the early hours of Friday morning of the week before last the Assembly met and considered the budget of the government and the Assembly, in an historic vote, rejected it. That was a surprising step in one respect because, as was noted by many commentators, this is the first surplus budget ever produced in the ACT in accrual terms. It is a budget which has been widely welcomed round the community as a good budget and one which, to quote from the Canberra Times, was one differed from by those opposite on matters of emphasis more than anything else. Mr Speaker, we had a budget which was widely expected to be welcomed by the Assembly and which, to the surprise of many including, I suspect, those opposite to some degree, was rejected.
The government clearly was confronted with a decision. What do we do? We had been told a number of things by others in the Assembly who had rejected our budget. We had been told by some on the crossbench that we should take out funding for the SIP if we expected to get our budget through. That was the message from some on the crossbench. We were told by the Labor Party and the Greens that it was appropriate for the government to resign in order to deal with the crisis that had been created.
I note in the Canberra Times column on Saturday by Ms Armitage that she reports, presumably after having discussed the matter with the Labor Party, that the Labor Party never really expected to have the government fall over this issue. The opposition never really expected to have the government fall over this issue. That being the case, the argument that the government ought to resign sounds a little bit hollow and a little bit insincere to me. Nonetheless, Mr Speaker, that is what the Labor Party was saying. It was saying that the government should fall. It was saying that we should go, as that is the parliamentary tradition.
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