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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (10 July) . . Page.. 2397 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

I am totally unconvinced that there is any integrity in this process at all. I was going to canvass the reasons outlined earlier by Mr Stanhope, but I do not need to now. Mr Moore, whose issue this is, has taken a position on this matter. He is not bound by cabinet decision on this matter, but today I understand he is going to abandon his principled position on it.

Mr Moore: You will have to wait and see.

MR KAINE: Well, we might find out from Mr Moore what some of the other curly elements of this deal between Ms Carnell and Mr Osborne were if Mr Moore can wriggle his way out of this deal and claim to come out of it with some integrity. He just has to do the numbers. There are six members of the Labor Party and there is Ms Tucker. I have just indicated my intention to vote against this on a matter of principle. The casting vote on whether the safe injecting place is deferred indefinitely rests with Mr Moore. What is he going to do? How is he going to explain to his electorate out there that he abandoned his position and his principle for personal gain, because that is the only conclusion that I can come to? I think there is a complete lack of integrity on the part of the government on this matter.

I said at the beginning that I was going to vote against this amendment, and I do so as a matter of principle, Mr Deputy Speaker. Everybody knows that I am opposed to a shooting gallery, but last December this place put in place an act that placed an obligation on the government to put a shooting gallery in place. The government, up until now, has been saying, "We have a right to our budget because the Assembly put an act in place that told us to go ahead and do this." If you have a right, there is a matching obligation. The government claimed the right to get their budget through. Now they are saying, "We abandon the obligation that goes with that right. We will just put it off into the indefinite future. There will be an election in between and hopefully the electorate will knock it off and we will not have to argue it."

No. There is an act in place. It is an act of this parliament which I opposed, but it was put in place by this parliament, and it was put in place with the support of Ms Carnell, Mr Smyth and Mr Moore. Those three people today are saying, "We no longer believe in that. Why do we no longer believe in that? Because we have done a deal with Mr Osborne." That is the logic of their argument. I will not go along with that debate. If they have the right to their budget with the money in it, which they have been claiming, they have the obligation to put that same act into effect. So, I will not go along with the government's little subterfuge to get themselves off the hook on this issue.

If Mr Moore does stand by the principle that he has always espoused, it puts the onus on him. The outcome of the debate on this amendment bill rests with Mr Moore. He was the proponent, the author of the original bill which became an act, and he is now saying it does not matter anymore. There was all that urgency to get the thing into place because one death is too many. Suddenly the urgency has gone. It does not matter anymore because if they stick by their guns they might not be in office next week. That is the argument.

There is no constitutional crisis. The Chief Minister has been beating up this story that we have a constitutional crisis. There is a long, long way to go in this place before you can say we are anywhere near a constitutional crisis on this issue. The government did

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