Page 2379 - Week 07 - Thursday, 17 August 2006
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Mr Corbell’s response was, “Not that I am aware of.” Today I asked the minister:
Minister, yesterday you stated that you were not aware of the letter from ACTPLA to the LDA regarding potential pre-auction issues over the EpiCentre site. Minister, have you investigated the existence of the letter and, if not, will you investigate if such correspondence exists and table it in the Assembly? If not, why not?
Today Mr Corbell’s response was:
Mr Speaker, I think Mr Seselja’s question yesterday, if I recall correctly and I will check the Hansard, but if I recall correctly Mr Seselja’s question yesterday was, “Are you aware of any correspondence raising concerns of criticisms of the process?” The answer to that is no and that remains my position.
Clearly, that was not the answer that was given yesterday. I will give the minister the benefit of the doubt that that was inadvertent. At the end of this adjournment debate or at the first opportunity after that could the minister clarify whether he is now saying, “No, that document did not exist”, or whether it is still the case, as he said yesterday, that he was not aware of its existence, in which case the confusion resulting from the different answers led to confusion over the status of the document. I request Mr Corbell to come back as soon as possible and clarify what he meant. Clearly, what he said today was not exactly what he said yesterday in his answer. I ask the minister to clarify that issue for the Assembly and I accept that it was inadvertent.
I wish to respond to Mr Gentleman’s earlier contribution. Mr Gentleman just gave us one of his stories, which may or may not be true, but we always take his industrial relations stories and the stories that have been put up by the union movement in recent times with a grain of salt. I say that for a number of reasons. Mr Gentleman must be very distressed. Yesterday the Chief Minister talked about record low unemployment in the ACT. Currently the national unemployment rate is 4.8 per cent, the lowest it has been in 30 years.
WorkChoices legislation has now been in place for three months. At the time the legislation was going through I believe Mr Gentleman, his mates in the union movement and his mates in the Labor Party were talking about the mass sackings that would occur as a result of this legislation. Today the opposite is the truth. In the first three months we have seen record jobs growth and the unemployment rate has dropped to 4.8 per cent—figures that have not been seen since the 1970s. Clearly, we have not had the predicted mass sackings.
If there were to have been mass sackings there would have had to have been mass hiring. We have had such a massive growth in employment that over the past few days the Chief Minister has been going on about how vibrant the employment market is and how great things are. We have not seen any mass sackings either in the ACT or nationally. Every time Mr Gentleman comes into this chamber and tells us a story we remember that it is a story and we take it with a grain of salt. Remember the comments of Sharyn Burrows on Lateline who suggested words to the effect, “Would it not be great if we could come back and highlight a death as a result of these laws?”
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