Page 3849 - Week 12 - Thursday, 23 November 2006
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fronted to the crowd of people who were there, and I have responded personally to the emails that people have sent to me. (Time expired.)
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (12.10): I did not expect to be speaking twice on this topic. I am going to support this censure motion. I believe it is the first one I will have supported in this Assembly, and it is not something I do lightly. The reason really is that to me it was just horrific that that debate was closed down because this was the closest thing that the community got to a broad ranging consultation about this library. It is not equivalent to consultation. They deserved a lot more than that. This is a discussion by their elected representatives talking about their issues in a forum.
While we have a majority government that has to stick together on this issue, I believe there must be discussions in the Labor Party about this. There have to be. There are representatives from Molonglo; they are ministers. They do not get to act as local members. I understand that that is a difficult situation for them. They are members of cabinet but they are also local members. If those discussions are not happening in the Labor Party, then I believe the community should be very worried, because it means that majority government is a shutdown of community considerations. What Mr Hargreaves has done amounts to a gag, although technically it is not one. But it amounts to a gag of the debate and that is what he is doing.
A motion to refer the matter to an Assembly committee is a small thing. It has been done dozens of times in the history of this Assembly. The committee system works like that. It allows all the issues to be ventilated. We can get a historical approach to it; we can hear all the pros and cons; we can actually get some expert advice. Whatever comes out of that becomes a decision that the Assembly is more likely to own. But what has happened now? The debate was closed down.
Ironically, it is probably going on longer now than it would have if you had not closed the debate down. But it has been closed down on a day when we are probably going to finish early. It is not as though we have got a crowded agenda. It is not as though we have a crowded agenda where we are going to have trouble fitting all the items in. My staff have been invited to a drinks session at 5.30. There must be some prediction that the day is going to be over by then instead of 6.30 as normal; so we have the time.
I think that at the very least, it was not thoughtful of you and it was not civil to this issue. Nor do I believe that Mr Hargreaves’s treatment of the many letters that he received from constituents was civil either. In fact, I think it was really insulting and I was actually blushing for him, because I do not think it is the kind of thing he will feel so good about later on. We all know that in campaigns stalls are run, letters are there, people can sign them. That signature is their message of sincerity. Not everyone is good at putting the words together but as members of the Legislative Assembly, we are doing it all day. We are signing letters that we did not necessarily write but we read them and our signature is equivalent to our writing them. It is so not fair to put those signatories down.
The other thing is that this Griffith library is one library in a whole system. People are acting within their rights to write from Jerrabomberra. They use the library. They are in their rights to write from Belconnen or from Campbell because our library is like that. We do not have the same books in every library. When you order a book, it can
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