Page 704 - Week 02 - Thursday, 10 March 2011
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the beginning of the sitting fortnight and that is why the government is suggesting that approach. I will be moving those amendments once Ms Hunter’s amendment has been dealt with by the Assembly.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (10.29): In addressing the amendments, I will go to Mr Corbell’s amendments first. It is interesting that we have had a change of heart from the government. Of course, they did not believe the committee should set who was the chair when they had majority government. I guess it is in the same vein as Bob Brown—what suits you, suits you. We see these changes come regularly from a government that is not actually committed to this process.
In his second amendment Mr Corbell is saying that the committee, with five members and support from the Committee Office of half a dozen staff, will get two weeks in which to consider the report, and the government, with 20,000 public servants to back them up, will also get two weeks to write its response. You can see the inequity in this. If you go back through the responses we have had from this government to estimates committees over the last nine or 10 years, you see that responses have been poor at best and dismissive in most cases. So I do not expect that giving the government an extra week to consider what they want to say will have any effect at all. But it will place an enormous burden particularly on the Committee Office and, I suspect, impact on the quality of the report. There is an enormous amount of material to go through. So in regard to Mr Corbell’s amendments, we will not be supporting either of them.
In regard to Ms Hunter’s amendments, what a surprise. The Treasury spokesperson for the Greens seems to have an aversion to hard work. We saw it in the first estimates sittings that she briefly attended. I think she turned up for about an hour on that first sitting day when the Treasurer was there, asked no questions and left early. That seems to be the practice of the Treasury spokesperson for the Greens. This is a very important bill and a very important process. I guess the Greens’ approach to this is based on the fact that they are fatally compromised on this. They have already said they are going to pass the budgets, indeed, they make budget submissions. So they are actually going to be scrutinising their own submissions to see whether they got what they wanted. If you think that is a fair and impartial process, I think you are fooling yourselves. It will be interesting to see who the Greens put on the committee this year. I guess when you are a member of the Greens-Labor alliance, you can do whatever you want. That just seems to be the way things go.
Ms Gallagher: It still hurts, doesn’t it Brendan?
MR SMYTH: No, no—what hurts is people do not take this seriously. The Treasurer says it hurts. No, I like going anyway. I quite enjoy the process.
Ms Gallagher: I’ll tell you who doesn’t take it seriously in this place.
MR SMYTH: I am probably over the last 15 years the only person that has consistently taken the process seriously in this place, because it is an important bill. The parameters that we set, the objectives of the government, affect the cost of living of ordinary Canberrans every day. There is another article in the paper today about housing affordability and how the battlers are being forced to cross the border. I just got a letter from a guy who said, “Mate, it’d be cheaper for me to move back to
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