Page 4329 - Week 13 - Thursday, 17 November 2005
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MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Gentleman): Order, Mrs Burke!
MR HARGREAVES: I am assuming that Mrs Burke did not know that he had been offered that briefing.
Mrs Burke: It is your problem and you did nothing.
MR HARGREAVES: It is my problem! I have offered a confidential briefing to the Leader of the Opposition and he has not had the courtesy to respond. Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I will bet you that he has not told his shadow minister that he was offered that confidential briefing. I will bet my thumbnails on that.
Mrs Burke: Your inaction is the problem.
MR HARGREAVES: The problem, in fact, is that the Leader of the Opposition, the so-called official Leader of the Opposition, does not have the courtesy to talk to his colleagues about those sorts of invitations.
Mrs Burke: We have spoken.
MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order, Mrs Burke!
MR HARGREAVES: Clearly, he has hung out Mrs Burke to dry on this. Had he indicated to Mrs Burke that he had been offered this confidential briefing, she would not have come into this place and embarrassed herself.
Mrs Burke: I am not embarrassed. You are embarrassed.
MR HARGREAVES: If she is not embarrassed, she should be embarrassed.
Mrs Burke: No, I am not.
MR HARGREAVES: You should be embarrassed.
MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Mrs Burke, I have called you to order twice. Next time I will ask you to leave.
MR HARGREAVES: The point that I am making here is not, at this stage, an attack on Mrs Burke, because I did that in question time and that was the end of it. I am expressing my disappointment and dismay at the Leader of the Opposition for, I assume, not informing Mrs Burke because, if she knew that he had been offered a confidential briefing and still marched down into this place and portrayed people’s pain on the public record, that makes her even more contemptible, which I do not actually believe is the case.
I believe that a man from over there who is not here at the moment has hung her out to dry. She ought to seriously consider the loyalties of this particular person to the rest of his colleagues, because I have not seen a lot of evidence of it lately. I can tell you now
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