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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 12 Hansard (12 November) . . Page.. 3454 ..

MS DUNDAS (continuing):

Having reviewed the past, let us look to the future. We can whinge about the past, but we cannot change it. We do, however, have much influence over the future. In the next year, we will see many of the government's reviews and Assembly committee inquiries-providing opportunities and setting challenges for our future. The Status of Women Committee report will, hopefully, provide the government with clear recommendations on how to move forward in the area of the status of women-not the status of blah, as Mr Humphries put it.

There are a number of reports which focus on Canberra's children and young people. I hope we capitalise on this focus and remember that, just because young people cannot vote, it does not mean they do not count.

We will have the Office of Sustainability fully functioning in the near future, hopefully providing a positive contribution to the long-term future of our territory. I hope-and I will work towards this-that, when we come to this debate in another year's time, the issues which have been distracting us for many years will have been satisfactorily resolved. I hope we will have moved on from petty point scoring and that we, as legislators, will be prioritising the core issues of equity, sustainable economy and practical environmental protection.

MR SMYTH (4.22): Mr Speaker, it is a pleasure to rise to discuss this matter of public importance. The ACT Labor government has broken many promises after its first year in office. The Chief Minister had an opportunity to stand up and spruik about the achievements of the government. He had 15 minutes in which to fill us in about their achievements-as a defence against our proposition that there are many broken promises. It was a 15-minute speech which curiously ran out at nine minutes and 22 seconds. He could not tell the people of the ACT a 15-minute story about what the government has done.

If you look at those short nine minutes and 22 seconds, half of it was aimed at the Liberal Party and the things we had or had not done. So we had a speech of about five minutes from our Chief Minister on what he has been able to achieve in his first year in office.

He started by getting his figures wrong. He thought that, in the first year of the Carnell government, only 48 bills had been in place. Well, I understand, from documents supplied by the Clerk's office, that from the period of 9 March to 14 December, which is only nine months, there were 70 bills from the then incoming Liberal government. Yet, for the past 12-month period, we have seen only 49 bills from the current occupants of the Treasury bench.

Mr Speaker, in that short nine-minute and 22-second speech from the Chief Minister, what we did not hear from him were the consequences of his actions in Health. We heard that they have had a review, and that they have implemented things. We heard that they have done this, and we heard about them giving extra money. We heard that they have sorted out the nurses dispute. Well, the nurses website does not say that, and the figures do not stack up on the promises they were meant to keep.

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