Page 3846 - Week 12 - Thursday, 23 November 2006
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of the consultation process, we would—with the caveat that I have not been able to do this over the last couple of days because I have been down here. I have answered the emails that people have sent to me, and there has been a flood of them. I have arranged for letters to be responded to if people have written to me. I have signed those off and I have a whole pile in my office, which I would be doing now if I were not doing this. I have met with the group at the library.
Mr Speaker, I attended the rally. Like my colleague Mr Barr, when there are decisions taken to close something, it does not take any guts to get up there and oppose that closure. It does not take any guts at all. But it takes a certain amount of courage to front a crowd who you know dislike you and to explain to them the reasons, whether they like them or not, and to listen to what they have to say. And I did just that, Mr Speaker, on the Saturday and I listened to the children. I have to say that some of the children touched me on the ticker quite dramatically because they were genuine kids. Other children were spiked by their parents with questions. The kids who spoke to me genuinely, I thought, were wonderful kids. You should know that, Mr Pratt, because you were there.
Mr Speaker, I was touched by a number of eloquent questions that were given to me and I know that the answers that I gave people probably did not satisfy them. But you cannot accuse me of not fronting that community and telling them directly from my mouth whose decision it was and the basis of that decision. And I did it. So you cannot say that I did not do that.
I need to say this publicly: Mr Pratt did, in fact, acknowledge that publicly—that I did actually turn up at that rally. I have forgotten the exact words he used, but I would like to express my appreciation in this place for that comment. I think it was an honourable thing to do and I appreciate it. We talk about the reasons why there is a censure moved against me for administering something. We are talking about why I did it. Why are we closing it?
We could have a history lesson here. I suppose it is probably warranted. Let us go right back to the original conversation around Griffith library. I have no idea, and I do not know if my colleagues can remember either, why the Liberal Party wanted to close it. The original decision to close the Griffith library was taken by the Liberal Party and I have no idea why. There are members in the opposition who were part of the Liberal government of the day who were party to that decision, but I still do not know what that decision was based on.
But I can tell you why the current one was made. There have been a number of decisions to close the Griffith library over a number of years. The first one was, in fact, taken because we wanted to enhance the Civic library service. We were going to put an awful lot of money into building the new Civic library. Then we would transfer the smaller one from the interchange into the city. It is 60 per cent greater in size and it will have a considerably greater number of services. Those services will need to be resourced. The source of those resources was going to be Griffith library. That is where we were going to get the people from.
To do that would mean that the Griffith library would need to be closed. That was the decision a number of years ago. We moved on. Then we talked about the consultation
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