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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 11 Hansard (30 November) . . Page.. 3588 ..
"All I can say is that Mr Williams, a senior union official in the ACT, must have extraordinary clout within the Labor Party.
"And make no mistake, VITAB was a scandal. The deal was described as "a fraudulent scheme" carried out by the promoters of VITAB.
"On top of the monetary losses, the failed deal forced the cancellation of ACTTAB's betting pool links, saw the agency lose several major punters interstate and ultimately, resulted in a successful no-confidence motion against Mr Berry.
"I wonder how Mr Stanhope, as leader of the so-called new Labor Party, will try to explain this decision.
"I call on him to say whether he has full confidence in Mr Williams and if he does, then he must tell Canberrans why he thinks that this person deserves to be a Minister in a future Labor Government," Mr Smyth said.
Mr Speaker, I table the document for the Assembly.
MR WOOD (5.53): Mr Speaker, I have been involved in political campaigns since my teenage years, and sometimes I have had a role in how those campaigns at a local level are run. The campaign against the Labor Party and particularly against Wayne Berry in the last election campaign was the most vitriolic and personal campaign I have seen in all that long period. It really got down to a very low level of attack. The whole campaign was based on a personal attack on Wayne Berry. It was absolutely disgusting.
I do not know whether this is just Brendan Smyth going off half-cocked on his own or whether it is a Liberal strategy that we might expect to be coming-something like the push polling they did some years ago. I do not have much say in what the Labor Party strategy will be in this coming campaign-and I do not particularly seek to-but to the extent that I have any say it will be to say this: "Next time we will not sit back and let it happen. We will not simply talk about policies as we did in the last election for this place." I will recommend that we not sit by and let it go on. I will recommend that we give back as good as we get-or as bad as we get. I will recommend we give back twice what we get, or three times what we get. If that is the campaign the Liberals want to run in this town next time, my recommendation-what the outcome will be, I cannot say-would be to give back many times over what is given to us.
MR MOORE (Minister for Health, Housing and Community Care) (5.55), in reply: My, my, how self-righteous we have become. Mr Wood, you may well recall the attacks Mr Berry started, almost from the day he became Leader of the Opposition, on certain crossbenchers and other members. More importantly, I would like you to think of the year and a half when you and your leader attacked Kate Carnell as having broken the law. Again and again, you asserted that she had broken the law. An absolute lie!
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