Page 3803 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 24 August 2011
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I expect Ms Porter to stand up, having heard Mr Seselja’s speech, and withdraw paragraphs (a) and (b), because he has done that. Perhaps you should move that the Assembly “congratulates” the Leader of the Opposition. Instead of “calls on”, why do we not just have “congratulates the Leader of the Opposition,” because he has done it, unlike your leader, who has not? So you need to get your facts straight. You cannot come into this place and put things on the record that purport to be facts when they are actually out of date or incorrect. And you are out of date and you are incorrect. I know a lot of your party think you are out of date and your time is coming, but the problem here is that we are talking about the people of the ACT.
I have heard it from both sides, and it makes me very sad. I can remember Kim Beazley in 1995 scurrying around Canberra saying “We’ll protect Canberra from the Liberals” and then he got caught by WIN News in Orange saying, “It is my preference that nothing be built in Canberra.” We had promises from the Rudd government. They were going to take up the axe; it was some sort of game they were playing. But the interesting thing is that when a federal Labor government takes the axe to Canberra, those opposite go to water. They have not done what Mr Seselja has done; they have not stood up for Canberra. We have the chief cheerleader for the cultural cuts over there. He actually tried to go on radio and say that because the National Gallery was cutting its travelling exhibitions, that would actually be good for Canberra because that would mean people would come here. Not even Kate Lundy bought that one.
I have not heard anyone opposite or in the Greens stand up to Kate Lundy and her obsession with destroying the National Capital Authority. That affects all our jobs. It affects the look of the city. It affects where we live. But again, mute. Nothing from the Greens, nothing from the Labor Party. They thought the personal and bitter attacks on the National Capital Authority and the cutting of the National Capital Authority were okay. We have a committee report that said to restore it, and we are now waiting on the Hawke report. I hope that will guide the federal government with some sense of common sense that the functions of the National Capital Authority, representing and carrying out the will of the federal parliament for the ACT, get the funding that they deserve. But, again, mute over there and mute on the crossbench, because they did not stand up for Canberra.
That is the hypocrisy of this motion. Mr Seselja has stood here and said, “I’ve already done it. But I haven’t taken a partisan view on this. I’ve just taken a broad view that I will stand up against anybody that wants to attack my home,” and he has done that. I hope that the leader of the Greens and the leader of ACT Labor would do the same—write to all parties. But they will not, and they have not, and that is the sad thing.
This motion is redundant. You need to check your facts. You cannot mislead the Assembly through your assertions. We had this great comment from Ms Porter when she started and she talked about 11 years of federal Liberal neglect. Okay, let us compare the 11 years to the four years of Labor so far. What have we got from Labor to help build up Canberra in the last four years? The simple answer is, a couple of weeks ago, after a stage-managed process—“Will we get the money? Will we not get the money? Yes, we will. No, we won’t”—we finally got the money for Majura parkway.
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