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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Wednesday, 11 February 2004) . . Page.. 243 ..

This is about embarrassment. I delivered a corrections reform package in June and, to gazump that package, the Chief Minister said to himself, “What can I do? I’ll go one better: I’ll announce a prison.” He did so, much to the surprise of the press, much to the shock of his staff and much to the amazement of cabinet, because such a decision had not gone to cabinet. It was going to be announced in a couple of weeks, which would have meant that in July the minister would have announced his chosen site for the prison.

But had the corrections minister done any work? No, nil, nix, nada, squat, zip, nothing. No, you do not have to do the work: you just make announcements, snap your fingers and say, “The Commonwealth government is stymieing my efforts to produce a prison for the people of the ACT. I’m outraged.” Don’t be outraged; do the work.

We did not have the announcement of the sites in July. It actually came out on a Saturday afternoon, I think it was 16 August, that the airport block that the Chief Minister had chosen was at the end of the shorter runway, the east-west runway. We were going to build a prison at the end of the east-west runway on a block of land that we did not own and that was not necessarily appropriate for the site.

Why wasn’t it appropriate? It was not appropriate because we had not done the work, Mr Speaker, and you know as a former minister that you have to do the work; you do not just make the announcements. But there was Mr Stanhope, snapping his fingers, saying, “I’m frustrated because I finally wrote to the Commonwealth in May or June or July and, gee, they haven’t answered my letter yet.” It does not work like that, minister for corrections. You have to do the work and then they have to do the work. There is no evidence to support this motion today, Mr Speaker.

Then we had the ongoing saga. When it was revealed that this site was at the end of an airport runway and that it was not our land and it was not necessarily available because the appropriate work to decide the future of that block and several dozen other blocks in the area had not been done because the ACT government in its laziness had only just asked, the ACT government was outraged, saying, “It’s the federal government’s fault, so we’ll go and find other sites.” How many other sites did it find? Four other sites. We had this absolute pretext that it was the Commonwealth’s fault and this twisting, twisting, twisting, always twisting.

John Hargreaves is the minister for twisting. He takes the line “I am hopeful that long-term land use planning strategies can be identified that concurrently protect the operational integrity of Canberra airport and meet the ACT government’s needs” to mean that the Commonwealth is putting the airport first. It is a sentence that says that it is looking at both. I do not see a priority there. If you are saying that being first in the sentence makes the airport more important, okay, it is the first in the sentence.

Let’s face it: no work was done. Fingers were snapped and demands were made and, quite appropriately, they were rejected. The fundamental point is that in 1988 and 1989 negotiations were conducted as to which land would come to the ACT and the agreement, everyone agrees, was that excess land would come back to the ACT. Unfortunately, the federal Labor government of the time and the incoming ACT Labor government of the time did not bother to put it in writing and subsequent governments of both kinds have been arguing with the feds, who say, “Show us your evidence. There is

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