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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Wednesday, 11 February 2004) . . Page.. 247 ..

government does something appropriate—looks at a responsible way of disposing of an asset.

I hope they will do it quickly. I wish they would do it quickly, because I think that some of the land around the airport should be released for other uses. But ministerial responsibility says that the Minister for Defence, the Minister for Finance and Administration and the minister for transport should take their roles seriously, which is the purpose of the study.

Mr Hargreaves talks about the minister for corrections federally. For your information, Mr Hargreaves, there is no minister for corrections federally; it is a state and territory responsibility. Yet again we have the ignorance in these matters that Mr Hargreaves so characteristically displays.

Mr Speaker, as to the so-called failure of the Commonwealth to abide by its own guidelines for the disposal of excess property or, as the amendment reads, the failure of the Commonwealth government and Commonwealth property disposals policy to take adequate account of local interests and needs in decisions on the disposal of excess property, the use of the word “failure” is inappropriate in both cases. Perhaps Ms Tucker might consider changing the words to request the Commonwealth government and the Commonwealth property disposals policy to consider or include, but they cannot fail when they have not been tasked with doing something.

If it is not in the guidelines that, as responsible public servants, they abide by, they cannot have failed. If in future you want them to consider it, I think we should write to them as an Assembly and ask them to consider it and say that we are being ignored. I think that would be appropriate, but you cannot condemn somebody for doing something that they were not tasked with doing. Mr Hargreaves’s original failure of the Commonwealth to abide by its own guidelines has not been proved; it is an assertion. Where is the proof, Mr Hargreaves? Like so much that is put forward in this place by John Hargreaves, it is fairy floss. (Further extension of time granted.)

To conclude, Mr Speaker, this is the embarrassment motion of the day. The level of embarrassment of the government at their own lack of activity over two years in corrections has been exposed. This debate is about a knee-jerk reaction: we put in a rehabilitation program and they announced a prison proposal. They had no site and they had done no work. They then dropped the name of a site that patently was never going to be used for that purpose to blame somebody else. The blame game was set up. We had then the announcement of another site, after we were going to have four and then nine sites, and then the government picked a site at Hume on which it had done no work so that the hero of Jerrabomberra could flex his muscles and say, “I will save Jerrabomberra from the terrible federal government.”

I think that it is important that people understand that. Clearly, the opposition will not be supporting the motion. If Ms Tucker wants us to support her amendment, she needs to remove the word “failure”, simply because I do not think a case has been made to show that the federal government have failed. If they have not considered it, I think they certainly should. To say that they have failed at this stage is unfair, but then again the whole motion is simply fairy floss.

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