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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 3 Hansard (6 March) . . Page.. 643 ..

MR SPEAKER: What is your point of order, Mrs Cross?

MR STANHOPE: I am answering the question.

Mrs Cross: No you aren't. The question was: how do you reconcile these amounts with your statement yesterday that the total cost of all reviews which you have announced to date will be less than $1 million? I would just like you to answer that question, please, Chief Minister.

MR SPEAKER: I think Mrs Cross is raising a point of order in the context of standing order 118.

Mrs Cross: Thank you, Mr Speaker, I was.

MR SPEAKER: I am happy to give you that guidance.

Mrs Cross: I am grateful for that guidance, Mr Speaker.

MR SPEAKER: I am happy to give it any time. But the point is that you did raise the question of reviews and I think the Chief Minister is entitled to mention them.

MR STANHOPE: So take it as given that the opposition, the Liberal Party, wishing to exclude itself from this costly review and exercise will not be included in the review. Take that as given and I will look at the needs of the executive, the government and the crossbench, and there is a significant saving that we can also potentially make.

There really is a nonsense in the opposition pursuing this particular issue and I think we do really need to put it to bed. Some of the issues we are looking at are issues that I have raised before. We have one in regard to Anne Cross. This is one of the issues which are obviously of concern and I am happy to give the information that the member is looking for. Anne Cross is a noted Australian expert in the area of disability services within Australia. We have engaged her services to advise on the work we are doing in relation to our response to the Gallop report.

In the context of that and overarching that we have engaged Mr Mick Reid, the immediate past director-general, now an adjunct professor at the University of Sydney, in relation to health, to advise us on structural issues and governance issues around the department of health. These are significant issues and, at the end of the day, they will have significant implications for people in this community with a disability.

We looked through the Gallop report-we looked through the eyes of the Gallop report-at your government's response to disability issues and wasn't it very interesting to read the article by Jenny Stewart in the insert in the Canberra Times this week about the previous government's attitude to Gallop and its preparedness to accept responsibility for disability services. In other words, it was not prepared to accept any responsibility.

One can extrapolate in relation to this. Because of your failures as a government, your failure to do the work that you should have done, you initiated the Gallop report. What did the Gallop report cost us? The Gallop report cost us $1.7 million. Why did we have

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