Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (10 July) . . Page.. 2406 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

I understand that everyone is in some way losing out of this. Whatever you do, you are going to be seen to be doing the wrong thing. That probably applies to everyone in this place, to some more than others perhaps, no matter what position they take. I understand exactly why Labor did what they did. If they are being bagged for being inconsistent, I think every other party or group in this Assembly could equally be accused of doing that. Mr Rugendyke and Mr Osborne, who have stood for stability in voting for budgets consistently, were suddenly prepared to go totally sideways on that argument because they were more concerned about the principle of a supervised injecting place. That is an arguable position.

Labor has taken a position against budgets. They also have strong in-principle support for the supervised injecting place, so they had an ethical dilemma, as Mr Rugendyke and Mr Osborne had. They had to decide what principle was going to be the more important. They came out saying, "We are in a different situation." That is also the conclusion the Greens came to.

We are not talking now about whether or not we support this government's whole budget. The events transpired-whether it was Saturday, Sunday or Monday really does not matter-it was clear that Mrs Carnell was not going to resign. As I have said already, I think she had the right to make that choice. We could see that there would to be dealing going on. We could see that the Liberals were staying. We could see that their budget was staying. We do not like that, but we could see it was staying. If we are going to have the budget of this government, then let us have one with the supervised injecting place.

That was the position the Labor Party took. You could accuse them of being inconsistent too, but they took that position after looking at the circumstances of the time. The same thing happened with the Greens. I had many meetings with members of the Greens over several days. Mr Humphries was getting exasperated and upset because four days had passed, as if it were four months. This was a difficult situation. People needed to work with the different processes they have. I have processes to work with the Greens. I talked to people in the Greens, and the membership was involved and interested. So there was time. There did not have to be this huge race.

When Mrs Carnell was offered this opportunity by Labor and the Greens, it appeared as though the deal was done. The reason given was peculiar, I thought, when I heard on the radio: "No, because we have done a deal and we do not do deals by media releases." I knew Mr Stanhope had spoken with Mrs Carnell. I do not want to get into who said what, but Mr Stanhope chose to speak with Mrs Carnell and I chose to speak with Mr Moore. I would have thought the government would have shown leadership by speaking to all the players. To take the line "They did not come to talk to me so why would I?" is not particularly credible, in my view.

I guess what we have ended up with here today in this debate is still the situation where there is a choice. Mr Moore particularly has a choice today. He can support the supervised injecting place by voting against this bill. I wait to see how he votes. I notice that it was not clear from his speech. Labor has made a commitment to support the budget to get the supervised injecting place. I have also said that there is a principle there that we can support. It is a most peculiar situation, in my view. As I said, I think we are all probably going to be accused of one sort of inconsistency or another, but we have all tried to grapple with the issues.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .