Page 1965 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 25 June 2008

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Question put:

That Dr Foskey’s amendment No 2 be agreed to.

The Assembly voted—

Question so resolved in the negative.

MR SPEAKER: The question now is that Mr Seselja’s motion be agreed to.

MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (5.49): I thank all members for their contributions. I would like to touch on some of the responses in a moment, but I thank particularly the crossbench members for seeing the merits in much of what we had to say today. What we have now is in fact agreement from all non-government members that this process has been handled very poorly. We have agreement from Mr Mulcahy on a number of the points that we have put. We have agreement from Dr Foskey on all of the points we have put—simply a different conclusion as to the sanction.

That is reflective of where the community are at at the moment. The community are very concerned about how this process has been handled. They are concerned about how the site selection was handled, about the government’s hiding of the facts and about how the government has handled this process from a committee perspective, from a public consultation perspective, from a freedom of information perspective and from a general good process perspective.

I particularly pay tribute to Dr Foskey, because she took the time to get across the very detailed arguments. I know that she received briefings from the government. I believe that she received briefings from ActewAGL. Certainly we gave her whatever documentary evidence we had in pursuit of our case. Dr Foskey did take the time. She had no particular reason to support us other than that she saw the merit of the case that we had made.

Nothing that we have heard in response undermines that case. The case in response was summed up a bit by Ms Porter. It was the “yeah but” defence. She essentially said, “Yeah, well, there is that document but we are told that actually that is the wrong date that you are looking at there. Yeah, there is this document that ActewAGL has saying that the sites are being ruled out, but they didn’t really mean that. What they actually meant was something different.”

We have an overwhelming amount of evidence pointing in one direction and we have clear contradictions between what the Chief Minister has said and what is reflected in

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