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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 4 Hansard (10 April) . . Page.. 936 ..

Personal explanations

MR HUMPHRIES (Leader of the Opposition): Mr Speaker, under standing order 46, I would like to make a personal explanation. In the course of question time, my name was referred to with respect to a motion supposedly being moved at the federal council of the Liberal Party this weekend which allegedly calls for the removal of the Aboriginal tent embassy. I want to read the motion which has been moved by the ACT delegation:

Members will see that there is no reference in that motion-or, to my knowledge, in any other motion being moved at this weekend's council-referring to the removal of the Aboriginal tent embassy.

MS TUCKER: I would also like to make a personal explanation. I believe I was misunderstood by Mr Smyth when he was speaking to the matter of public importance. He summarised my position in a roundabout way. He said that I wanted to apply the precautionary principle and suggested that I was not supportive. I want to make it quite clear I have not said that. I have asked a series of questions and said we are still determining the exact position we should take on the matter.

Very fast train-feasibility study

Debate resumed.

MS TUCKER (4.30): I have the media release on the land transport east coast very high-speed train scoping study by the Department of Transport and Regional Services. I will pick out a couple of things from it. The Greens are concerned and agree with Mr Hargreaves that it is a disappointment that the federal government decided to conclude its investigations into the possibility of a very high-speed train.

We did ask questions in this place about a number of aspects of this expenditure of public money and the best way to improve the rail system of this country, which we are supportive of. I also raised in this place questions about the process of the federal government when they were initially looking at it.

On the process point, I asked the federal government for a copy of the various analyses and feasibility studies that were done at the time, because I was particularly interested to see how comprehensive the environmental analysis and so on were. I was never able to see that work. That is a bad situation. I condemned it at the time and continue to do so. It is extremely unaccountable to have a closed process with such a major expenditure of public money.

As a member of the ACT Legislative Assembly, I would have thought I definitely had a right to look at that work, but I also think the general community should have a right to look at that work. Fair enough if you wanted to take out some of the economic costings because of the so-called commercial-in-confidence problem. Even that would have been

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