Page 2101 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
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backflips, the halving of a project, the sudden health inquiry, the lack of interest in residents. Yes, it was about projects and infrastructure, expanding the business base and proving how hairy-chested I am, but it was not the residents. The residents were never mentioned once—except in derogatory terms by the Chief Minister. That is so typical of this Chief Minister.
Yes, we asked questions. No, we did not squander our time. It is interesting that we seemed to get in trouble because we had too many questions. Ms Porter was the chair; she controlled the questioning. Ms Porter had the numbers; she only had to say, “All right, all of you out—closed meeting of the committee.” She had the numbers. They used it in the dissenting report. They just cleansed any suggestion that it would be an affront to the government; they just cleansed anything out of the report that was critical as far as they could. The majority of the recommendations came from Mrs Dunne and me.
Ms Porter said that three-quarters of the questions were asked by the opposition. So two-fifths of the committee asked three-quarters or two-fifths of the committee asked nine-twelfths, which means that three-fifths of the committee asked three-twelfths. So each of the Labor members asked one-twelfth of the questions—one-twelfth of the questions. That is lazy. That is what it is: it is simply lazy.
At the end of each day, I still had questions to ask. I had questions to ask at the end of every session. I did my work. I did not spend my time there like Ms MacDonald, playing on a mobile phone, which is a lack of courtesy to those who attend: playing video games, texting or emailing—whatever she was doing—or sitting and reading the City News. It was great to see that the ABC news filmed Ms MacDonald sitting at the estimates committee reading the City News. It is an affront to what we do in this place and it is an affront to the people that elect us. They do not elect us to be so disinterested—so disinterested that three-fifths of the committee managed to ask only three-twelfths of the questions, because they had no questions.
This is what we see when we have a Labor-dominated committee in this way. They broke with a decade and a half of tradition when they stacked the committee, they took the chair and they took the majority. And they still could not run it. They are lazy, incompetent and without a work ethic. That is the summary of the Labor members’ commitment to the estimates process.
There are a few things that came out of the committee hearings very quickly. It is characterised by the four great disasters as the government answered questions: the data centre and power station project; the infrastructure spend; the balloon fiasco; and the emergency services move to Fairbairn, which has been managed so poorly that for years now this government has been paying rent—taxpayers’ money—on empty buildings.
When they had a fire, the incident control centre—which was perfectly good; in fact, we were recently told in the public hearings on the fire and emergency services inquiry through the legal affairs committee that it was perhaps the best incident control centre in the country—was dragged back to headquarters. That is good planning! Build it, send them over there, wait until something occurs where it is needed and then pull them back to the old building that had proved to be inadequate. That is a summary of this government’s approach to many things.
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