Page 1034 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 25 February 2009
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the stimulus package and I think there is no question that the Greens recognise the need for the government to act at this time. By creating such alarm in the way the minister did, I think he created a great level of concern amongst the community. And we have seen that by the fact that organisations such as the P&C felt the need to issue a highly political press release because they were so alarmed by the frenzy that the minister sought to whip up.
The minister’s objective can only have been his own personal ambition in this place and for his own career. This was all about the minister’s own personal ambition and not about the substance of the policy question and no accurate reflection on the position of either the Greens or the Liberal Party. He is simply out there to focus on his own ambition.
I think this is an unfortunate way to conduct public policy in this town. I hope this is not a signal of the way the minister intends to conduct himself in the future, because it did nobody any favours. It did not move forward a debate on whether this is the best way to proceed. Through obfuscation, the minister created confusion. He created alarm in the community over something completely unnecessary.
Once we had the briefing today—my colleagues attended the briefing at lunchtime—we sat down. The list is reasonably sensible and we have given in-principle support to the proposal that the minister is putting forward. If he had actually had the fortitude, the decency and the courtesy to come forward last Thursday and provide that briefing to the other people in this place before he went to the media, I think we could have saved ourselves a lot of time and a lot of angst for the community in the last couple of days.
I will finish by saying that I trust that in the future we can find a better way to conduct public policy in this town on important matters, particularly on the education sector which affects so many people in Canberra and which so many people are rightly concerned about. The state of our schools is one that can always be improved. And that is no comment on their current state—it is not my area of expertise—but there is always room for improvement. We should be striving to give our children and our young people the best possible education we can and I think that is not a matter we should be playing politics on or furthering one’s own personal ambition on.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
The Assembly adjourned at 5.30 pm.
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