Page 3986 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 5 December 2007
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have been appalled at his behaviour in the past and I may be appalled again. I do not like the way he has spoken about some community organisations that are advocates for their constituents.
Mrs Burke: You are letting him off the hook a lot here, Deb.
DR FOSKEY: Nothing is black or white, is it, Mrs Burke, although you might like to say otherwise. With respect to representing the ACT government, I have to say that Mr Hargreaves seems to be popular in forums where he represents his portfolios. On the whole, because a no-confidence vote in a minister is a very serious issue, with all that in mind, I will not support this motion.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (4.36): It is interesting, the bar that Dr Foskey sets. She has just run through the list of 18 failures of the minister, basically agreed with all bar three of them and then said that there is not enough evidence. I am not sure how one proves anything to the Greens. But it is interesting.
Mr Barr said, “I will defend the minister. I am going to talk about his wonderful record.” But he ran out of examples in about four and a half minutes and for the last five and a half minutes of his speech he simply attacked the Liberal Party. That is fine. He said that we have a lack of policy substance. Well, I will give you two examples, Mr Barr. The LINK project is a project that I started. It only took your government six years to complete it. We had a five-year roads program that started in 2000. Your government, Mr Barr, faithfully reported on the program in every budget paper until this year. Last year we pointed out to your government that you were still using our road program. Where is your policy on a road development program in the ACT? Where does it appear in the budget? It does not. Mr Barr’s arguments do not carry.
Mr Hargreaves did the same thing. He was going to get up and defend his record, but in less than six minutes he got straight into the personal attack. He could not list for the Assembly and the people of Canberra the things he had done or validate that they had not been failures. His own words turned very, very quickly on himself in the argument. He attacked Mr Pratt and said, “You have shown me some graffiti of private homes.” He should have listened to what Mr Pratt said. Mr Pratt said, “Because of your inability to clean up graffiti on your premises in Reid, it has now spread throughout Reid and into Braddon.” That is how it works. If it is not cleaned up within 24 hours, it emboldens the graffiti artists and off they go. That is simply what has happened. That is a confirmation of this minister’s failure.
At the nub of this motion is the Tharwa bridge. I would like to explore the Tharwa bridge issue a little. It is the issue about which Mr Hargreaves often comes into this place and misleads this Assembly.
MR SPEAKER: Withdraw that.
MR SMYTH: That is at the heart of this.
MR SPEAKER: Withdraw that.
MR SMYTH: Paragraph (3) of the motion refers to “misleading over reports”.
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