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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 6 Hansard (13 June) . . Page.. 1651 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

As for the next recommendation, there has been some interest in non-compliance with the government's own procedures around tendering. Now, when a government of the day puts up particular procurement practices and then apparently fails to comply with them, yes, that is of interest to the rest of the parliament, and I believe it is our job, in fact, to point that out.

We also have a recommendation regarding ergonomic practices for computer use. Is that another trash recommendation of Mr Humphries? Well, I guess I have a different view about health and safety and computer use. Then there is the SACS award recommendation. Well, maybe that is a trash recommendation, I guess, because it has been made in, I think, two other estimates committee reports and some of my own committees reports. That is supported by evidence of the community three years in a row-trash! Okay, that is the government's view.

Then we go asking for a little bit more analysis of the indexation that should be applied to education. That seems like a reasonable issue, considering that the education sector saw that as a loss of, from memory, $500,000. It might not be worth much to Mr Humphries-another trash recommendation, according to the government; pretty important for the school community nevertheless.

I could go on through most of these recommendations and make the same point, and I think it would be more useful if we actually did see from the government and its supporters, backbenchers, some more objective analysis of what it is that they are actually upset about. Mrs Burke and Mr Hird now have a joint report, which I have had a very quick look at, and there are a couple of points in there that I would have enjoyed to hear the discussion on in the committee process. Unfortunately, we did not have that opportunity because Mrs Burke and Mr Hird chose not to give us that opportunity. And for that reason I have to draw attention again to the actual dissenting report that is on the back of this Estimates Committee report. It is six lines. The first two lines say:

I remember the chair saying that. He was actually saying that as a joke. It was a way of encouraging people to participate. The chair was encouraging people to participate. He was saying, "This is my view. Your role in the committee is to bring it back. This is what I've done." "Please, please contribute," he was saying. So that is the context of that first statement. It was not put in context, so it is selective quoting, which is not fair-and we have heard Mrs Burke talk, at length, about integrity. That is not fair; that is selective quoting, because of the context that it was put in. And then the next four lines basically say that the draft is blatantly political and contains many errors of fact. The responsibility of any committee member was to point out what those errors of fact are. I would have been interested to know that at the time. I still do not see real errors of fact pointed out in this dissenting report, but I will look more closely. Maybe they are there.

Then the dissenting report says, "Since the majority of the Committee refused to accept our contributions ..." Now, once again Mrs Burke is talking about integrity. You cannot with integrity make a statement like that. If the majority of the committee refuse to accept contributions, that means four members at least. That means there were two Labor members, and there are Mr Rugendyke and myself. Now, I do not think I ever refused

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