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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Tuesday, 25 May 2004) . . Page.. 2141 ..

This is what we are here today to do, to make emergency measures to avoid further delays. In addition, the government has insisted on debating its bill as a condition of agreeing to sit today. If we vote down its bill and attempt to bring on ours, there is a very real possibility that the government will either vote ours down in a tit-for-tat exercise or again adjourn the debate. Either way will leave the people of Gungahlin high and dry again. As I have said, if something is not done now, it is likely to drag on until after the election with no real progress, handing the problem on to another Assembly of unknown composition and introducing a whole range of new unknowns into the process. The delays on Gungahlin Drive have to stop and they have to stop now. The people of Gungahlin have been mucked around over this for years and today the Liberal opposition is saying enough is enough.

Let me say candidly that we are not, as some callers have claimed, getting the government out of the trouble that it got itself into through a series of failures of process, delay and characteristic indecision. We are not here to get the government out of trouble. It will be clear to you, Mr Speaker, and those opposite, that we are never in the business of getting the government out of trouble. However, we are in the business of getting the people of Gungahlin out of trouble, and that is what we are here to do today.

So we have decided that, although this legislation has its flaws, we will support it. On balance, we consider the harm to the people of Gungahlin by not acting would be greater than the harm to the democratic process by acting. In the term of this Assembly we have seen the results of avoiding hard decisions and they demonstrate amply that the refuge offered by a fog of indecision is illusory. But we can only make these calculations and come to the conclusion that the damage to the political process and body politic is acceptable if we declare here and now that this will not be a precedent; that this is a one-time agreement to resolve a situation that has dragged on for years. This is the beginning and the end of it.

We will expect this government and any future government of any political complexion to see this sort of thing coming and deal with the objections and the challenges through the normal processes. The normal processes have had to be abandoned because this government has just got it so wrong. The normal processes have had to be abandoned because this government has not been able to keep any of its commitments. We are in this situation because the government has obfuscated for three or four years now, making commitments to the people of Canberra it knew it could not keep, and then having to duck and weave and blame other people for the delays.

The delays have to stop. The government has to sit up and take its medicine. The government has to admit that what it is doing here today is not the best possible way, and the government has to admit that we are here today solving a mess of the government’s making, so that the people of Gungahlin can get their road. There are many delays and there are many disappointments for the people of Gungahlin. The first of those disappointments is that the road is not being built. The second is that if it is ever built by this government—and this is what we are here today to ensure—they will get half a road. They were promised a four-lane road.

As my colleagues have said on a number of occasions, we have the great term of Orwellian literature: “four lanes bad, two lanes good”. What we see here with this

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