Page 3989 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 5 December 2007
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maintained, on the agenda the issue of rock throwing at buses and now, to the credit of Mr Corbell and the absolute shame of Mr Hargreaves, it has been elevated to the level of an international issue by Mr Corbell at the recent police ministers conference in New Zealand. Well done, Mr Pratt! If that is ineffective, then you are doing a good job.
The other issue, of course, is the Tharwa bridge. Mr Pratt has been out in the community—I have been out there with him—at the shopping centres. If you went to a shopping centre occasionally, Johnno, you might learn about how people feel about the Tharwa bridge. They see it as a microcosm of the failure of the Stanhope government: no road, no bridge, no school and no hope. That is what they are saying. There is no hope for Tharwa under the Stanhope government, and they suspect that they are being victimised because Tharwa residents stand up to this government. Val Jeffrey and others have stood up and said their piece and they have been punished.
The minister has misled the Assembly. He has failed to do his job, failed to adequately manage, failed to deliver any project on time, failed to deliver on budget and failed to ensure that standards for which he is responsible are met. He says, “How can you put taxis on the list? It is a private enterprise.” Yes, but you are the minister responsible for their legislation. The minister has failed to follow appropriate process, and the best example of that is the Tharwa bridge. He staggers from disaster to disaster on the bridge. He is contradicted by his own words, by his own reports and by his own Chief Minister who has been out of the Assembly during this debate so that he did not have to defend Mr Hargreaves.
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Minister for the Environment, Water and Climate Change, Minister for the Arts) (4.46): I think Mr Smyth’s speech summed up—Dr Foskey went to this as well—the seriousness with which the Liberal Party treat this particular motion, a motion which, at its heart, is that the Minister for Territory and Municipal Services should be sacked; that he should lose his job.
A motion of no confidence is a motion that a minister should be removed from his portfolio responsibilities. It seemed to me that the gist of the rising crescendo that was Mr Smyth’s hysterical response was that the minister should be sacked for his lack of capacity to tell a good joke. Amongst the litany of apparent failings is that the joke he told at the November celebrations was not particularly good. Among the reasons advanced by Mr Smyth for Mr Hargreaves being called upon to resign is a bad joke. You could almost leave this debate at that point. In a debate on a motion that a minister should be removed from his ministerial responsibilities, that he should be sacked, Mr Smyth stands up and says that the minister should be relieved of his responsibilities because he told a bad joke. I actually thought that it was quite a clever joke.
Mr Hargreaves: It was a great joke.
MR STANHOPE: I thought it was a good joke. I will bet it got a good round of laughs. I thought it was quick and witty. It was essentially a quite good joke. And the
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