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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (10 July) . . Page.. 2398 ..


MR KAINE (continuing):

have an alternative to doing a deal with Mr Osborne and Mr Rugendyke. They did have an option. They could have negotiated with the opposition if they were serious about getting their budget through. The government attacks the opposition because the opposition denied supply. No. Mr Osborne and Mr Rugendyke denied supply. The Labor Party has acted on a principle for five years. The government has always got its budgets through with the support of Mr Osborne and Rugendyke.

Ms Carnell: It takes nine.

Mr Humphries: It takes nine to block supply, Trevor.

MR KAINE: The only thing that changed this year is that Mr Osborne and Mr Rugendyke pulled the rug out from under you. That is why the budget did not go though. But you would prefer to do a deal with Mr Osborne and Mr Rugendyke, even to the extent of abandoning all of your principles. There are one or two on the government benches who have not abandoned their principles, but you will do a deal with Mr Osborne and Mr Rugendyke to the extent of abandoning your principles rather than respond to an overture which I understand was made to you by the Leader of the Opposition. What is the justification for that?

As I say, I do not believe that the deal with Mr Osborne and Mr Rugendyke was so simple as to accept that they have actually won something when the deputy leader of the government can come in here and say the SIP is still firmly on the government's agenda. Mr Osborne and Mr Rugendyke think they have won something. They have won nothing. So there has to be more to the deal. As I say, we probably will not know for months what else is part of that deal. If Mr Moore is going to come clean on the issue he may reveal some of it.

I suppose my challenge is to Mr Moore. He is the person who has had the most to do with putting this supervised injecting place into place. He, this morning or perhaps this afternoon, will now determine whether his act is implemented or whether it is not. Mr Moore will determine that. That is where the final vote will be. He will determine whether his safe injecting place goes ahead or whether it does not.

MR HARGREAVES (12.10): We have spoken about the budget in relation to the supervised injecting place, but it needs to be said that, essentially, the opposition opposed the budget in its totality rather than each individual line, with the exception, and let the record show this, that we opposed the health line. If people opposite care to read what was said or remember what was said, we said we were not passing the budget because we do not have any faith in you. I remind Mr Rugendyke of what we said and what I said myself. We were not going to go along with this budget because we did not have faith in the government because of its track record and what we felt it was going to do in the future. We talked about Bruce Stadium, we talked about Kinlyside, and we talked about a range of things, but essentially it comes down to a question of trust.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I mention trust because trust is relevant to this bill that we have before us. We believed that at least there were a couple of members opposite who we could trust to go with this trial, not an ongoing supervised injecting place necessarily, because there are some of us on this side who are concerned about that. But we were all committed to a trial because we did not believe it was fair to stand by and watch these


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