Page 882 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 2 May 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
government are losing the trust of this community. They are not transparent, they are not open and they conceal mistakes—to the detriment of this community.
MR STEFANIAK (Ginninderra—Leader of the Opposition) (5.47): The motion is a simple one and what it calls on the government to do is simply to provide the people of the ACT with an assurance that its spending can be detailed and measured to provide a tangible benefit to the people of the ACT and to provide a guarantee that ensuring good governance is a priority for the ACT government. That is not rocket science. We do not need any tricks or games, like the Chief Minister is playing games by doing the usual substitution to turn the motion into one congratulating the government. That is ridiculous. In fact, that in itself goes against the government’s core values, the government’s statement that it put out in 2001 when the Chief Minister—
Mr Stanhope: Excellent document.
MR STEFANIAK: It is an excellent document, Chief Minister, and what we are calling on you to do is to live up to it. What we have heard here today in this debate, which has ranged over quite a number of topics, is a liturgy of failures where you have gone against your own—
Mr Stanhope: A liturgy?
MR STEFANIAK: A litany; I am sorry. I keep saying “liturgy”. I will use different words: a whole series of failures—a stack of failures, myriad failures—over the 5½ years of your government where you have failed to live up to these noble sentiments which go for a number of pages. I will just deal with a few others. You stated:
ACT Labor does not have core and non-core promises. What we say is carefully considered and realistically judged. We will stand by what we say.
There will be no hoopla, no circuses, in a Stanhope Labor Government.
There will be no gloss.
There will be no beating of the breast.
How much breast beating have we seen from this Chief Minister and this government, over the last couple of years especially, and especially since they have attained majority government and become the most arrogant government we have had in the ACT since self-government? He went on to say:
There will be no Bruce Stadium fiascos, no Canberra Hospital implosions, no bizarre oddities—
We have seen any number of fiascos here, and my colleague Mr Pratt has just listed a large number in the emergency services areas. Talk about fiascos! I had never before seen every brigade captain and deputy captain come in here with their vehicles and hand their keys in. I had never seen such a fiasco as we saw, and we still see, in relation to emergency services in this territory, with people who have given decades of service being absolutely disgusted with the lack of transparency and the lack of
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .