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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 6 Hansard (13 June) . . Page.. 1650 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

considerably over when Labor was in government, even though there is a recent decline in the outcome that we would like to see in that area.

It seems to me that what we have here is a lost opportunity; that there was an opportunity here to be constructive and to try and build up. In fact, it occurs to me that the most constructive thing I have seen with regard to budgets and budget comments was actually done by Mrs Carnell in her last role as Leader of the Opposition when she used this opportunity to present an alternative budget. She was prepared to do the work, and say, "Actually, we don't like the way the budget was done. This is how it should look," and then went to an election saying, "Look, we've shown you how we would go about a budget process."

I think those opposite are just too lazy to take that kind of approach and they are not prepared to indicate to the committee what they are prepared to do. They would much prefer just to whinge, and of course whingeing and whining is the easiest way to go for an opposition. But an opposition here, in the circumstances of a minority government, has many, many more opportunities than that, and I have to say that this is just part of the range of lost opportunities-that they have gone for a political approach instead of one that was rational and sensible.

That is a general comment. There are exceptions to that. There are in this committee report clearly some efforts to criticise, and I notice that, within my area of my responsibility, there are some areas that I take seriously and that I will look at and get in, but I have to say that they are few and far between.

MS TUCKER: I seek leave to speak again briefly.

Leave granted.

MS TUCKER: I sought leave to speak again briefly because of the fact that we were not able to hear Mrs Burke's and Mr Hird's comments in the normal process of the debate, although we did try to give them room to do that, but they chose to speak after we had all spoken. I just want to respond to a couple of points, and I will respond quickly to Mr Humphries too. I am glad Mr Moore at least acknowledged at the end of his speech that his were fairly general comments, and there were some recommendations at least that he thought might have been constructive-he did not say exactly what, but something other than trash or whatever Mr Humphries' words were. I think he said it was all trash.

I just cannot think we are reading the same report, really, when you look at the recommendations. You can look at the recommendation regarding the analysis of the need for community facilities in the inner suburbs. The need for that was well supported in the report by evidence, and actually a system failure, because PALM had actually undertaken a good audit process, but unfortunately in the development in the Griffin Centre that process was not known about, and Mr Moore acknowledged that, so I would not call that a trash recommendation. I would say that was pointing out a system failure-a government system failure, that's true, but it needed to be pointed out, and we would like the government to do something about it.

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