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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 9 Hansard (7 September) . . Page.. 3057 ..
MS CARNELL (continuing):
Members have been asked to attend in many circumstances. This relationship has grown over the years. I think you would have had to have been blind not to have seen what was happening. You would have heard, also, that our relationship with China was growing and that we were looking at a relationship that would, hopefully, if everything went appropriately, end in a sister city relationship.
Mr Speaker, I think the sorts of comments we have heard from a number of people today were just a little bit rich. I seem to remember that last year Ms Tucker was very keen for us to form a sister city relationship with Phnom Penh.
Ms Tucker: No, it wasn't last year.
Mr Moore: The year before, I think. It was the year before.
MS CARNELL: The year before, was it? Well, I am sure I still have the letter. Mr Speaker, I would not have thought the human rights issues were all that squeaky clean in that part of the world either, but that seemed to be the view at the time. Maybe that just suited the environment at that moment.
Mr Speaker, when it comes to Mr Kaine, we have heard Mr Kaine show a lot of displeasure about this sister city relationship. It was interesting to look at two particular circumstances. One was on process. Rosemary Follett let the Assembly know on 19 October 1993 that she planned to sign a sister city relationship with Nara. She signed it in Japan on 26 October, a week later. She announced it to the Assembly and then went to Japan and signed the agreement. It had never been raised in the Assembly prior to that time. At least, we cannot find mention of it, and no-one can remember it prior to that time. At that particular time Mr Kaine got up and supported Rosemary Follett. He said it was a wonderful idea. He went on to say:
I am also delighted to hear that the Chief Minister-
that is, Rosemary Follett-
intends to pursue other twinning proposals. I am sure that there are many cities throughout the world, perhaps some of them in those areas that we sometimes refer to as the Third World, that could benefit.
He went on from there, Mr Speaker. Then, Mr Kaine, when talking in the debate on Versailles, made some very interesting comments when he was disagreeing very strongly with the approach that some members of the Assembly were taking with regard to discontinuing the relationship with Versailles. He said this:
Are we going to do that to every government that takes an international action that displeases us? If we are, we should chop off the Japanese, we should chop off the Chinese, we should chop off the United States, we should chop off the Brits. Who would be left in the world that we could talk to?
He does go on with that approach, Mr Speaker. If you chop off relationships with people every time they do something that you don't like much, it does not lead to good international relations. That was what Mr Kaine said back on 20 June 1995.
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