Page 2005 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 May 2009
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Mrs Dunne: Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker.
MR STANHOPE: Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. I do understand the sensitivity of the Liberals in relation to this—they are caught out.
Mr Seselja: Show us, Jon.
MR STANHOPE: I think it is fair to say, “Here we go again.” Here we have the Liberals engaged in lazy, gutter politics.
Mr Seselja: What? Another mislead from you?
MR STANHOPE: Here we go, here we go! The rabblerouser does not want to hear this. I listened to you in silence; I listened to the travesty of nonsense in silence. Here we have the Liberals engaging in lazy, gutter politics, misleading whoever gets in their way, oblivious to how many ordinary folk they might distress or alarm or misinform. The Leader of the Opposition’s obsession with land rent would almost equal his and Mr Hanson’s obsession with lunchtime walks and the comings and goings of the Deputy Chief Minister. And we know what that particular obsession led Mr Seselja and Mr Hanson to. What next? Land rent or Facebook? Facebook mark 2? The Facebook kings! It could almost be laughable if this crew were not seriously proposing themselves as the alternative government of the ACT.
There is a dark and extremely tasteless side to the antics of the Liberals, and it is on display here today in this motion and in the misleading antics that have built up to it. I do not know who Mr Seselja has that is giving him strategic advice or political advice, but certainly it is somebody that is advantaging the Labor Party significantly. I must say, you would be probably better off sticking to your Facebook antics. As I said, there is a dark and troubling side to this emerging pattern of behaviour.
By selectively quoting and selectively releasing material provided by the government and government agencies in good faith under the FOI Act, Mr Seselja and his acolytes have made a mockery of the freedom of information process, not to mention the fact that they are misleading the public and misleading local media. They are actually culling the material they receive to suit a particular misinformed and wrong impression of what the material contains. It is the kind of undergraduate nonsense we have come to expect from all the cowboys over there at the “Lazy Zed”, except that if Mr Seselja had tried to pass off this sort of analysis in a first-year essay in any reputable university he would have been thrown out, and rightly so.
This is what Mr Seselja and his office and the Liberal Party have done: they extracted and then publicly released certain excerpts—we have seen them repeated here again today—from correspondence between ACT departmental officials and financial institutions and withheld all of the information from that FOI release that did not suit their particular argument. One of the journalists before actually proceeding with the story asked Mr Seselja, “Is there anything in other material that you have that contradicts the position that you have put to me?” and he was told no. He was misled, he was manipulated, as was every other journalist in town who took the information
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