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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Friday, 14 May 2004) . . Page.. 2007 ..

confidence. Can we please learn that it is better to be open and up front, tell people what is going on and let them have their say, rather than giving them the impression that they are going to bulldozed or that they are not even going to be listened to, as was the case in this instance? There is a great deal of ill-will and there are hurt feelings out there that this government has to remedy.

MRS CROSS (6.12): Mr Speaker, I am not going to go over all the points that were covered by Ms Dundas and Mrs Dunne, but a couple need to be repeated. I do want to make just one point clear about this whole process. It was inevitably going to go off the rails once the decision was taken to deny appropriate consultation with those people in the community who would be most affected by this development. This committee’s inquiry reinforced the fact that the process was less than transparent, and that did get people’s backs up.

Of even greater concern—Mrs Dunne has touched on this—was the fact that, according to the evidence given to this committee, those who recommended that the minister use regulation 12 had not even read the regulation, which was a shock to most of the members of this committee. For me, it was disappointing to see the reaction of some members who appeared angry that KAG dare challenge this matter. The argument that was put forward by the community against the flawed consultation process was thorough, impressive and to the point.

I must say that at one point we were entertained by the jelly baby incident, where the Karralika Action Group brought in five huge bags of jelly babies representing 5,000 residents and another bag of 60 that represented the other side of the argument. They were offered to us but, quite rightly, we said, “No, give them to the hospital.” The jelly baby incident will go down in history as one of the most entertaining ways of presenting a representation of residents in a community.

I found the minister’s frequent disparagement of KAG during the inquiry to be unjustifiable and, frankly, unfair. It did appear to be a little bit of buck-passing, which was not fair and disappointing from a minister. I found KAG to be one of the most impressive people power lobby groups I had ever seen, not just in my time in this Assembly but in my time generally, in my adult life. I found the people to be a great cross-section of the community—of professions, generally of high intellectual capacity, very articulate and concise. They knew exactly what they were saying. They were not people that we would call fundamentalists or zealots. They were reasonable and all they wanted was to be treated in a fair way, but they were not.

I am cautious as to where the government will go from here. The minister did indicate during the inquiry that he may put together an advisory committee. I am sceptical about such a move. The reason that I am sceptical about such a move is not that an advisory committee in general would not be a good thing from a consultative point of view. It is that I have become rather cynical from my experience in that it could be stacked against the Karralika Action Group, depending on who is represented on that committee. Sometimes, from what I have seen, we tend to stack committees to show the community that we care, but at the end of the day we are doing it because we already have a result that we want. I have some concerns. I do not want that to be the case, but I am concerned, I am cautious.

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