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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 11 Hansard (25 September) . . Page.. 3233 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

30 pieces of silver were a handful of votes in O'Connor, and a noisy minority from that suburb is now dictating to distant Gungahlin.

The fact is that there is no road. The fact is that no work has been done on building the road. The fact is that Mr Corbell has squibbed and has offered an absurd two-lane alternative. Even that is going to take longer than the original four-lane road would have, and that is assuming-and this is only a wild assumption-that it ever gets started. The two-lane road was a con trick, and everything that has been done about this since Mr Corbell became the minister has been a con trick.

Even while the change in policy was accepted by cabinet, Mr Corbell was in this place earnestly assuring us-Mrs Cross, Ms Dundas and me-that yes, consideration would be given to various aspects of it. Remember the bus-only lane? Remember the tosh that we talked about? It was silver-tongued, as Mr Corbell often is, but it was nonsense. There was never any intention to build a bus-only lane. Now the thing that has been holding us up is the Fitch report. We have the Fitch report somewhere-well, we don't have it; the government has it and one presumes the Institute of Sport has it, and we know that the Canberra Times has at least part of it. What we need to do is see it. But Mr Corbell says, "Yes, you can see it, but, well, just not yet." He is like St Thomas Aquinas: "Oh Lord, make me open to the people of Canberra, but not just yet."

This report was financed jointly by the territory and the Institute of Sport. It seems, from the reports and the extracts that have been read to me, that it is very critical of the western route. It takes issue with the noise, the pollution and the impact on the general amenity of the Institute of Sport. Now, the Fitch report was going to be the umpire in this dispute. Mr Corbell set a great deal of store by what came out of this report. But it seems that, once the umpire has spoken, he does not like the sound of that particular whistle.

On many occasions in this place I have likened some of Mr Corbell's characteristics to those of certain politicians of former times, and I was thinking about this earlier today when I was thinking about roads and my home town. I thought about the Bruxner Highway, which runs through Lismore and was named after Mick Bruxner. He was known as the Colonel and was the redoubtable leader of the Country Party in New South Wales for many years. Like Mr Corbell-I suspect he has never been likened to a Country Party figure before-Mr Bruxner was very selective in what he heard.

Mr Bruxner, like Mr Corbell, was ardently ambiguous. If any action favoured the Liberal Party or the Labor Party it had to be avoided at all costs; it was indeed the work of the devil. But if the Country Party had advantage out of that act, then of course it was the blessing of the Almighty itself and had to be embraced as electoral manna from heaven. This is exactly what we see with Mr Corbell. He is a latter-day Mick Bruxner. The report is good if it is favourable to the western alignment and, if it is not, it is a bad report, a very bad report, and a report that needs to be hidden away.

We know that this report is critical, but we just do not know how critical it is, because the minister won't allow us to see it. This minister needs to demonstrate that he has grown into the job, that he is not putting hubris above all things, that he is prepared to bite the bullet and admit that the weight of expert opinion is firmly against the western route, and that his policy is simply wrong.

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