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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (10 July) . . Page.. 2425 ..
MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):
Labor should never have handed such power to the two independents in the first place. Labor should have supported the Budget. Future governance in the ACT would have been better if it were the convention that Budgets go through and that the fall or continuance of governments depends on separate no-confidence motions in the Chief Minister. It is now likely that the Liberals will play payback when Labor is in minority government. Labor has allowed hunger for power to get the better of it.
Of course, the scenario that Mr Quinlan spoke about before-"Put us in government; we will split the bills and we will get the budget through and the SIP"-relied on one very important assumption or premise. It was that the Liberal Party would do what we have done every time we have been in opposition and support a Labor budget. Despite the inaccurate statement by Mr Stanhope on the radio today, the Liberal opposition has always supported a Labor government's budget, or at least not opposed it, which is the same thing in all material respects.
Mr Hargreaves: It is not the same thing.
MR HUMPHRIES: It is. If we do not call a vote on something, we do not stop the budget from going through, and we never did; so that is the reality of the situation. I put Labor on notice of the fact that if it has established-or should I say re-established-this convention, it is not something that can be walked away from. It is not a power that will reside only in the hands of a Labor opposition and not in the hands of anybody else. The Liberal Party will observe in particular what happens in next year's budget, Mr Speaker, and see what the Labor opposition at that time does about that budget, because a strong argument was put in 1995 by the Labor opposition that we should not allow the Assembly to amend budgets. We supported that argument; but it has now happened through the back door and it is Labor which will have to undo that damage.
Mr Speaker, I have one final point to make. Mr Stanhope and others say that the Chief Minister ought to resign with her budget being rejected. He has not cited any relevant ACT authority for that proposition, but he obviously does not speak for the majority of people in the ACT because, when asked in an opinion poll in last Sunday's Canberra Times whether, after the ACT budget was rejected on the basis that it included money for a heroin injecting room, the Chief Minister should have resigned, the answer was yes for 16 per cent and no for 84 per cent.
That shows how badly out of touch the Labor Party is on this issue. When it acknowledges that it has done itself huge damage and, incidentally, the institution of self-government huge damage, it may be able to rethink its policy for next year. As it is, it has nothing but a shambles to show for its efforts in the last few weeks.
Question put:
That this bill be agreed to in principle.
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