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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (10 July) . . Page.. 2396 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

The Chief Minister, against her party's policy, voted only six months ago to put a safe injecting place in place in this city. Today she is backtracking. Another minister of the government is doing the same thing. They presume, by deferring this, that in a year's time we will have an election, and they will go to the election with some form of credibility on this issue? What is their position going to be if this becomes an election issue? Look at their record? A record of ambivalence and abandoning principle. Abandoning party policy in the first place, and then abandoning their stand which was contrary to party policy in the second place. They are going to go to an election on some sort of principle on this issue. Mr Deputy Speaker, the people in this electorate are not that ingenuous, not that silly, that they are going to accept that as an argument.

The person who I believe has most to lose from abandoning his position on this issue is Mr Moore. This has been Mr Moore's issue ever since he has been in this place. The act that we are seeking to amend today is Mr Moore's act. Yet today, despite all of his commitment to this, to his principle and to his electorate, he is going to abandon it. What is the principle behind that? The only principle is self-survival. There can be no other.

I just do not see how Mrs Carnell, Mr Smyth and Mr Moore can come here today and even mention the word "principle". They voted for a shooting gallery six months ago. Today they are going to vote for the deferment of that virtually indefinitely, with an election in between, and they somehow say it is the Labor Party that is lacking in principle. Mr Deputy Speaker, I am not convinced, and I do not think anybody listening to this debate would be.

Mr Humphries, in his attack on the Labor Party, said, "What changed between Friday and Monday?" There is only one thing that changed between Friday and Monday, from my observation, and that is that the Liberal government did a deal with one Independent, and then subsequently the second Independent followed along. From the time of the debate in this place last Friday morning, Mrs Carnell and Mr Humphries switched into attack mode and began to talk to Mr Osborne about a deal. We still do not know, Mr Deputy Speaker, what the details of that deal are.

Mr Osborne and Mr Rugendyke opposed the budget only last Thursday because it contained money for a shooting gallery. In tabling this amendment, Mr Humphries said the government has not abandoned the shooting gallery. In his own speech he says, "This ensures that the SIP remains firmly on the government's social policy agenda." In other words, the two members of the crossbench, if they support the budget today on the basis of this amendment going through, have totally abandoned the principled position that they adopted only last Thursday and Friday, because the SIP is not off the agenda. Mr Humphries says so.

So how come that Mr Osborne and Mr Rugendyke have agreed to support the government today on the basis of a spurious deferral of the implementation of something which the government is obligated to put into place by an act of this place? There has to be more. We will not know what the more is for months yet. We will not know what other conditions the members of the crossbench put on the government in order to undertake to support them today, first of all on this spurious piece of legislation, and secondly on the budget.

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