Page 4060 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 13 December 2006
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No-one has suggested that the opposition should not scrutinise the government. What we are talking about here is the way it has been suggested that the planning minister and his authority and his public servants should be called into question. It undermines public confidence in this government. It undermines public confidence in this planning minister and it undermines the confidence of the business community.
I thought that those on the opposite side of this place want to support the business community, yet Mr Seselja continues needlessly to pursue this matter. He pursued it in a disgraceful way, taking every opportunity he could to ensure that public servants, a government department, the government and the minister were presented in the worst possible light. I believe Mr Seselja was way out of line.
As we have heard today, Dr Foskey, with her remarks and accusations in her letter, also rode on the back of Mr Seselja’s campaign to undermine this minister, this government and ACT public servants. The undermining of our public servants, the LDA and the planning and land authority, the ACT government and the Minister for Planning is entirely reprehensible. Mr Seselja owes Mr Corbell, Mr Savery, Ms Hughes, our excellent public servants, the ACT business community and, ultimately, the people of the ACT an apology. Instead, he stands in this place and stamps his foot and beats his breast and yells across the chamber like a boy in a school playground caught out in some kind of misbehaviour. Methinks, Mr Speaker, that Mr Seselja is a tad too strident in his remarks—if you could call them that.
Mr Stefaniak does not help the opposition, of course, by having to rely on Canberra Times editorials for information to rebut Mr Corbell’s motion. Mr Speaker, I might ask: who is the Leader of the Opposition in this town?
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (12.16): Mr Speaker, it is like old home week here today. We have the Minister for Planning standing on his dignity, defending the indefensible. The predictions of the opposition over a number of years are coming home to roost. In December 2003, at the end of the debate on the Planning and Land Bill, I asked, “If we make all these changes that are the sole aim of the Minister for Planning, if we establish ACTPLA, if we establish the LDA, will things be better in the planning community two years down the track?” The resounding answer to that question today is no.
From the time of the establishment of the ACT Planning and Land Authority and LDA under the Planning and Land Act, we have seen a litany of mistakes, of things going wrong. The Chief Minister, in his usual theatrical way and with his usual capacity for verballing people, has tried to imply that what Mr Seselja has been doing in the last six months or so, inquiring into and asking questions about the process in relation to the selling of land in Fyshwick and asking the Auditor-General to use her officers to inquire also, is in some way an attempt to say that there are some nefarious acts going on.
Although the Chief Minister was all theatrical and implied it, he could point to not one word said by any member of the opposition that asserts that an official or the minister or anyone involved in the bidding acted nefariously. There are two choices here: they could be knaves or they could be fools. The things that have been pointed
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