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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (20 June) . . Page.. 2190 ..
Mr Rugendyke: What should I withdraw?
MR QUINLAN: You should listen, Mr Rugendyke. You keep saying that two members of the government crossed the floor to support the Labor Party. As I remember, at the time you went into the public forum and kept calling it Stanhope's shooting gallery. It was Michael Moore's initiative.
Mr Smyth: And you supported it.
MR QUINLAN:
That is exactly right; the Labor Party supported it.Mr Rugendyke
: I stand corrected.MR QUINLAN: It became a decision of the Assembly, and still you used the power you had on the crossbench to block the budget. That, to me, is far more serious than this attempt on the part of Labor to defer expenditure incorporated in the budget. Let the record show that Mr Rugendyke is leaving the room.
MR HARGREAVES (4.03): Mr Speaker, it is very difficult to put an argument on an issue which has not been canvassed sufficiently to people who have the so-called balance of power in this place if you are doing so to their backs as they are departing. I want the record to show now, if Hansard did not pick up the interjection from Mr Rugendyke at the time, that he said in response to Mr Quinlan, "I stand corrected."
Mr Smyth: On the issue of whose bill it was.
MR HARGREAVES: On the issue of whose bill it was, Mr Quinlan said that Mr Rugendyke had gone out and said that it was Mr Stanhope's shooting gallery. Mr Rugendyke has misrepresented the Labor Party in public, by his admission here today, and I look forward to a press release from him acknowledging that the main person putting forward the safe injecting room proposal was Mr Moore and that the Labor Party was supporting that proposal, in that order, but I may wait in vain, Mr Speaker.
I want to put on the record a couple of my views about this scheme. We heard it said in the Estimates Committee about how the consulting process to which this government holds itself so proudly was not done particularly well. Whilst it may be said that in 1995 it was part of the Liberal Party's policy platform, no-one had heard anything about it since. The most common theme of the Catholic Education Commission, of the associations for parents and citizens and for primary and secondary school teachers, and of my contacts in the school community, having spent many years on the Erindale College board, the Calwell High School board and a few other boards, was that the scheme was new to them; it just appeared at the last minute. This government did not consult the community widely on the issue before saying that the scheme was going to commence in September. It is going to commence a matter of days before the caretaker period is embarked upon. I think that is an appalling piece of work.
We remember the Bruce Stadium report. I do not wish to draw too much of a similarity with it, other than to say that the Auditor-General said that there were early warning signs that costs were going to blow out. One of the biggest things that he pointed to was
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