Page 733 - Week 02 - Thursday, 12 February 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MR SESELJA: He is wasting time with spurious points of order.
MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: There is no point of order, Mr Stanhope.
MR SESELJA: No, there is no point of order, is there, Madam Deputy Speaker? We expect that we are going to get spurious points of order from the sensitive Chief Minister. I will be flagging an amendment to this motion, which I will be circulating in just a moment, and which I will be moving.
We need to go to the facts. We came out, on the very first day, and welcomed the fact that Kevin Rudd had adopted the policy we took to the last election in terms of insulation for homes. We said it was good policy prior to the election and we said after the election that it was still good policy. We do not change our view on whether it is good policy depending on whether Kevin Rudd adopts it, as opposed to Mr Stanhope. Mr Stanhope, prior to the election, refused to back our policy. He backed a number of other policies of ours but he refused to back this particular policy. But when Mr Rudd announced it as part of his stimulus package, he said it was a beauty. We saw the fawning that began on that day. The policy that had been put forward by the Liberals which could not be supported by Mr Stanhope prior to the election was suddenly good policy. We believed it to be good policy then, and we believe it to be good policy now.
There are a number of aspects—and my amendment will go to this—which are positive. But we do actually need to have a genuine debate, not a confected debate, putting up straw men and not backing them up with any claims. He has not backed it up. It must be said to the media who are here, to those who are listening to these proceedings and to those who will read this Hansard, that Mr Stanhope again, and right throughout the week, has been putting forward propositions which he knows not to be true and which he has no evidence to back up—none whatsoever. He tells us that he has written a letter to all of the P&Cs and P&Fs. Well, we are keen to see what is in that letter, and whether that is as misleading as his other public statements. It is simply not true.
Madam Deputy Speaker, with respect to the other proposition that we are having put to us by the Chief Minister and by the Labor Party, of course we have seen Jon Stanhope fawning over Kevin Rudd. We have seen him saying what nation building this is and how visionary this is. There is nothing in it for health; there is nothing in it for a number of areas which we all believe could be part of the stimulus package. And that is at the crux of this issue. Everyone agrees that there should be stimulus. No-one is saying that there should not be. We have made it very clear there are aspects that we think are very good. In fact, we came up with those ideas months ago. We are not going to turn around now and say we do not agree with them. Jon Stanhope is putting up straw men because he lacks an argument.
When you actually break down the argument of what he says, he is saying that there should have been no scrutiny of this package. He says that, no matter what the package is that is put forward by Kevin Rudd, it should be accepted without question. That is the proposition of the Chief Minister today, that has been the proposition of the Chief Minister all week and that is something that he has parroted from the federal
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .