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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 9 Hansard (7 September) . . Page.. 3047 ..
MR STANHOPE (continuing):
second am I suggesting that I would not support a sister city relationship with a city in one of those states or a city in one of those nations. I think you could name almost any country around the world and we could find a significant human rights abuse there, and I condemn and will agitate against those abuses everywhere and at any time. But I also do not think we advance the cause of people in those nations by refusing to engage with them and by refusing to seek to develop a special relationship through the sister city relationship.
Our position is that we think the argument has not been made that we should not engage in sister city relationships. We do not think this one has been made out particularly well. We think the process is genuinely appalling and we refuse to be a part of the rubber-stamping of that process, but we have not been persuaded that the matter should not go ahead. We will not rubber-stamp it.
Mr Kaine: Some of us will vote against it.
MR STANHOPE: Some of you will vote against it. The Labor Party will not. We have indicated that we will not oppose the formalisation of the arrangement, but we will not be a part of the process that delivers it.
MR OSBORNE (7.58): That was one of your better efforts, Jon; 28 minutes, and only in the last minute we worked out why you were not going to support the motion. Just on the Labor Party, Mr Speaker, I cast my mind back to the last time we had an issue on sister cities in this place. I remember it was back in 1995 or 1996 and it was in relation to nuclear testing. It is interesting to read some of the speeches of the Labor Party in relation to suspending our sister city relationship with Versailles. It seems to me that it is okay to oppress your people and it is okay to murder. There are pages and pages here of human rights abuses in China. That is okay as far as the Labor Party is concerned: "We will not stop the sister city relationship, but that is okay, yes." A number of years ago, when nuclear testing was done in the Pacific-
Mr Stanhope: Tell us about mandatory sentencing.
MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Stanhope, please. Mr Osborne has the floor.
MR OSBORNE: I just feel the need to read some of this. Mr Berry, for example, talked about that issue, Mr Speaker. This is a quote from Mr Berry:
Mr Speaker, the corporate image is alive and well amongst the Liberals. The same insensitivity to the issue of nuclear testing exists now as existed when the Liberals first endorsed a move to this twinning arrangement, at a time when the photographer aboard the Rainbow Warrior was murdered by the French. We have just heard Mrs Carnell use the same arguments as Mrs Thatcher used in the case that dropped the sanctions against South Africa. Look at how effective that would have been. The world sanctions on South Africa worked; and here we have Mrs Carnell mouthing the same language as Mrs Thatcher used in the argument against those sanctions, which were rightly taken out by the world community and which resulted in freedom for the African people.
Do not worry about the Chinese people, Mr Speaker. He went on to say:
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