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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (10 July) . . Page.. 2422 ..

Mr Speaker, that is a fairly accurate picture of what occurred in the course of the last 10 days.

Let me deal with a few comments made in the course of this debate. When I pointed out in the debate that the idea of splitting the appropriation bill into two parts, an appropriation for the budget as a whole and an appropriation for the safe injecting place, Mr Berry interjected, "You didn't try that with us."

Let us go to the issue of what was being raised there. Mr Berry was purporting to say by that remark, presumably, that Labor would have been prepared somehow to come to the party and support the budget in the event of its being split in two. Labor was prepared to oppose the two put together, the budget as a whole and the SIP as a whole, because when they were put together it was prepared to oppose the total of that; but when we split them in two, the opposition supposedly was prepared to support both of them.

Can someone explain to me how bringing these two issues together in the one document somehow makes them unpalatable when separately they are palatable? It makes no sense at all. Obviously, what they were hoping would happen is that the Independents would vote against the SIP in a separate appropriation and vote in favour of the budget in a separate appropriation and allow Labor the luxury of continuing to vote against the budget but make sure that both the budget and the SIP got up.

You have to be pretty simple to think that that kind of subterfuge is going to fool anybody, pretty simple indeed, and it did not fool anybody. In discussions of this kind over the last few weeks, that kind of shallow trick was barely considered by anyone on this side of the house; but, to the extent that it was, it was perfectly clear from the crossbenchers in this place that that was not going to be acceptable.

That takes up back to the nub of the matter: had Labor taken office as they said that they were going to, as they wanted to, and formed a government in this place, how would they have passed the budget? We are expected to believe somehow that Labor was going to take the reins of office in the middle of this crisis from the Carnell government, which was falling apart over the issue, and that Labor was going to show authority and leadership and was going to get the budget through the Assembly, preserving the SIP, against the certain knowledge, knowledge which was put to this government by the crossbenchers, that they were not prepared to wear the government and its budget while there was a SIP in place.

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