Page 1932 - Week 05 - Thursday, 3 May 2012
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You can just about get everything. So exactly what Mr Seselja has predicted is allowable, according to the document that has been given to the opposition. The minister needs to stand and say that the officials were wrong, the document was wrong or he was wrong; they are the choices. Either what we were told was wrong, what is printed here and that I have just read out is wrong, or the minister, yet again, has got it wrong. And remember that this is the minister who in 2004 was found guilty of persistently and wilfully misleading the Assembly. Say whatever you have got to say. But before the 2003 election he was caught in O’Connor saying, “There will be no Gungahlin Drive,” but in Gungahlin he was caught saying, “We will build the road.”
So we have got the record of the minister. We have got the measure of the man. The shifting sands that occur with those opposite as they try to explain away their embarrassment of being caught—caught out yet again—not across his brief, not having asked the appropriate questions of the officials, not having read the document that has been provided. From that document I would assume that if Dan Murphy has got a fridge he can get the fridge replaced.
Mr Corbell assumes that every business out there in the ACT that belongs to a chain actually pays their one bill for their electricity in head office. So every Westfield across the country sends all their bills back to head office, wherever it is—Sydney—and Frank signs one cheque and sends it off to one electricity supplier because they have got one contract. That is what Frank Lowy does all the time—just to make Mr Corbell’s case.
McDonalds have fridges and lighting, interior and external, and they have motors and they replace things; they have got lights and all sorts of things. He is assuming of course that every McDonalds electricity bill is paid by headquarters. But it is not.
Mr Corbell: It’s a franchise, you goose.
MR SMYTH: “It’s a franchise.” Of course it is a franchise! That is the whole point. Most of the businesses in the ACT I suspect would be cost centres and they have their own financial controllers and they negotiate their own contracts, often with local suppliers.
So we have got the document and we have got what the officials told us, and that is in direct contrast and contradiction of what the minister says. We have now got the Greens hurriedly going to their officials again to get their briefing and their take on the deal. The Greens knew we were right, because Mr Rattenbury admitted that the basis of his clause amendment was “just in case what Mr Seselja said was true, we’ll put in a safety catch so we can catch them later—but don’t tell anybody”.
They are all exposed. So there it is: yet again we have a bit of legislation where the government does not know what it is talking about and the Greens blindly go along with it because that is what you do when you are in the Greens-Labor agreement. At the end of the day it is quite clear that the Greens-Labor alliance does not know who is paying for what. The reality is that it is another $32 million tax on the people of the ACT.
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