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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 13 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 3708 ..

Mr Quinlan: Because I had other things to do. I wasn't riding on every word of this, don't you know?

MR HUMPHRIES: More important things to do. It is important enough to raise today in the course of this debate in order to make some allegations against, or reflections on, me and the opposition.

Mr Quinlan: In the context of this final report.

MR HUMPHRIES: Why didn't you raise them before so that the report could have included them?

MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Humphries, direct your comments through the chair.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, I reject the allegation that has been made. I suspect that, if Hansard is perused, it will be shown that either Mr Moore was not asked this question or, if he was, he denied it.

MRS DUNNE (11.44): I think that Mr Humphries hit the nail right on the head when he said this is a kangaroo court. We have had the findings of the Privileges Committee. They are serious and have been taken on board. People have paid high prices as a result of the Privileges Committee inquiry.

I suppose it is from there that we have to look forward to what comes in the future, but we can look forward only when we take into account the things that happened. As the question of the question has been raised, I think it is appropriate that I should address that issue, because that question was drafted in my office. I cannot in all honesty recollect entirely who drafted it, whether it was drafted by me personally or by a member of my staff.

I will give a little background as to why that question came about. That question came about because of the constant problem I was having and members of the public were having in getting answers from, and access to, the Minister for Planning. If members would care to peruse the notice paper and have a look at some of the press releases I put out at the time, you will see that I was in fact running a bit of a campaign to get the Minister for Planning to answer my letters. In fact, I put on the notice paper a question asking the minister when he would answer my letters.

It had a miraculous effect. I had been waiting for months and months, from December, to get answers to correspondence from the Minister for Planning. I put a question on the notice paper and, boy, within a week I had an answer to everything. I do not think that I should, quite frankly, have to bully a minister of this place to answer correspondence about constituent matters. They were not things that I was just vaguely interested in as a matter of whim. I was taking constituent matters to the minister, and he was not getting through his correspondence. That is the genesis of the question.

That question was about protocols and time lines and whether there were rules set down by this government, because they certainly were in the previous government. I knew that there were rules set down by the previous government about the appropriateness of members of the Legislative Assembly in the previous government answering questions

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