Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Wednesday, 11 February 2004) . . Page.. 175 ..

Given such evasiveness, I can only conclude that prescribing the Karralika development under regulation 12 was all about control rather than confidentiality, about stifling consultation rather than showing concern for the patients’ treatment, about deliberately snubbing the community. It never truly had anything to do with confidentiality. In short, Mr Speaker, it is evident that the prescription of the Karralika development by the minister was falsely based under the terms of the regulation and should never have been applied.

Mr Speaker, I call on other members to implore Mr Corbell to admit right here in the Assembly and not through his preferred avenue, the Canberra Times, that he was wrong to invoke regulation 12—no excuses, no justification. Mr Corbell, just say you were wrong. Say that you falsely implemented regulation 12 and enlighten the Assembly as to why you would incorrectly use regulation 12.

Mr Speaker, I have to say that the claim by the minister that wide and extensive consultation has taken place is equally ludicrous; it is simply an atrocious distortion of the facts. As everyone knows by now, this wide and extensive consultation amounted to a letter under ACT Health letterhead and compiled by the architects being handed to a handful of residents whose homes would be closest to the planned new additions. There was no consultation, and to describe it as such is to abuse the intelligence of everyone to whom the claim was made. It merely told a handful of residents that this is what is going to be done and that’s that. If the minister calls that consultation, I suggest he have another look at the definition of that word in his dictionary.

As for the minister’s readiness to denigrate those who might question him, Mr Speaker, that is only par for the course. Those of us who sometimes find ourselves on the receiving end of his disparaging tongue are used to it, but it is a very different matter when the minister starts taking swipes at the—what did he call them?—“hysterical nimbys” who had the gall to speak their minds.

You will no doubt recall, Mr Speaker, that when answering a question I asked him yesterday, the minister was unable to avoid describing as hysterical those who had expressed dissatisfaction. As an aside, Mr Speaker, it might come as a surprise to the minister that the objections being voiced by his “hysterical nimbys” in fact in the main relate to the scale and nature of the expansion of the facility and not to its function, of which most of them have been aware for a long time.

A further point, Mr Speaker, concerns the minister’s intention to call in the application during the process of the consultation and consideration. This is not an instance where use of the call-in option is appropriate. On the one hand, it is contradictory to make the conciliatory gesture of inviting a more broadly-based participation in the process of consultation and deliberation while, on the other, dangling a sword of Damocles in the form of the call-in power. This project does not warrant, on any grounds, this pre-emptive, even threatening, decision.

Mr Speaker, it is clear that things cannot go on as they have because the issue is not going to go away. If it does continue on this unsatisfactory course, it will truly show up as a sham the Labor Party’s code of good government that grandly proclaims the values of openness, honesty, fairness, integrity and accountability.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .