Page 2460 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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not got campaign finance reform. We do not have the level playing field that we set out to achieve.
Ms Hunter has done this to the people of the ACT for very strange and inexplicable reasons. It has been quite clear to my colleagues and me for the last two or three weeks that we were going to get to this situation tonight—because Ms Hunter was just not prepared to engage. We would sit down and say: “Can we have a talk about where we are going with campaign finance reform? These are the things we agree on. These are things which we think are important. Can you tell us whether you are going to support them or not? Can you tell us whether you are going to keep your word about Mr Smyth’s provisions? Can you tell us whether or not associated entities are inside the cap or outside the cap?”
These were simple questions. When we were in the committee, associated entities were inside the cap, but somewhere along the line they ceased to be inside the cap. Ms Hunter would not engage. I do not know whether she was embarrassed; that she did not understand what was going on. But I think now that she is embarrassed. She made commitments to the people of the ACT, by signing up to the majority report of the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety, that we would go down a particular path, but she has reneged on it. She made commitments to the people of the ACT when she supported Mr Smyth’s legislation in principle, and she has reneged upon it.
The people of the ACT have been sold out by Meredith Hunter, who did not even have the decency, after a number of attempts to meet with her, to meet and discuss this today. She sent her staff. Her staff went away and they came back and her staff rang my staff at the eleventh hour to say, “No, we are not going to support any of these things.” I knew that she was not going to support them; if she had been going to support them, she would have told us weeks ago. But she did not have the decency to walk through my door, look me in the eye and say: “I have broken my word. I have broken my commitment to the people of the ACT.” That is the measure of the leader of the Greens in the ACT—the people who came here with their parliamentary agreement for third-party insurance but have not given it. They have sold out to the Labor Party, and in doing so they have sold out the people of the ACT.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development) (11.07): This is a bill of compromises; there is no doubt about that. There are compromises on the part of all parties in this place. It obviously is not the bill that Mrs Dunne hoped she would get, but that is because she has had to compromise as well and she has had to accept that some provisions that she was hoping to see in this bill have not come to pass.
There are many provisions in this legislation that the government, the Labor government, would prefer not to see in the legislation. We believe that significant elements of the legislation are onerous and unfairly restrict the capacity of different entities and organisations to participate in the political debate. We believe that many of the reporting requirements are overly onerous. But we have accepted that in an Assembly where no one party has the majority we need to accept that there is give and
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