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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Wednesday, 3 March 2004) . . Page.. 635 ..

MR SMYTH (Leader of the Opposition) (11.58): The opposition will be supporting both of the amendments. We agree with the removal of the word “overwhelmingly” because, while the social plan has been welcomed, or its release has been welcomed, it is not the glowing endorsement that the government would have people believe it is. We also agree with Ms Dundas’s amendment. I do not believe the opposition can endorse the strategy. But I do not believe anyone cannot endorse the goals. They are goals—and indeed perhaps more goals should be in the document.

Amendment agreed to.

MS DUNDAS (11.59): Mr Speaker, I seek leave to move the amendment circulated in my name.

Leave granted.

MS DUNDAS: I move:

Paragraph (2), omit “strategy”, substitute “goals”.

I believe I have discussed this at length in my previous speech on this topic. As I said, I think we need to support the goals, but it is hard to support a strategy when it is nonexistent.

Amendment agreed to.

MS MacDONALD (12.00): I believe it has been an interesting debate or discussion on the social plan. The government of course do not oppose either of the amendments and I want to say that the social plan as a document is actually part of the starting process; it is not the completed process. It is my belief that you need a framework to start with, so I applaud the fact that we now have this framework to work on.

I would like to make some comments about what some of the speakers said this morning. Mr Smyth started by saying that he would oppose the motion in the first place. With him having supported the amendments, I will be interested to see whether the opposition are still going to oppose the motion as a whole. I might be going out on a bit of a limb here when I say this, but Mr Smyth said something about Mr Quinlan being asked about the economic white paper and there was a comment about “statements of the bleeding obvious”. Mr Smyth seems to have a habit of quoting out of context, and often without providing full information to the rest of the Assembly or the committee. I have often found this and I find it quite frustrating when he does that.

In terms of making statements of the bleeding obvious, while the Treasurer may well have said that, my take on it would be from a different perspective. Several years ago I made a similar comment, although I was a schoolgirl at the time so I did not use such language, Mr Speaker, as you would appreciate. I made the comment that something was very obvious and why would you want to write it down. The comment that was given back to me was, “Well, people may be aware of it, but until it is actually put into writing it is not crystallised.” I think that is a very important point: until something is put in writing it is not necessarily crystallised.

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