Page 3128 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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Lastly, I would like to say that nobody is questioning the use of no-confidence motions as a tool of the Assembly. The question is about using this in the final two sitting weeks of this Assembly. It is quite clearly nothing but a political stunt, and the Greens will not be supporting the motion today.
MR HANSON (Molonglo) (10.57): I would like first to commend the Leader of the Opposition, Zed Seselja, for bringing this very important motion before the Assembly. He has not done it lightly. This is as serious as it gets, and I think that he has laid out the compelling case as to why this Assembly should show its want of confidence in the Chief Minister.
The Chief Minister chose to, rather than address the issues raised by Mr Seselja, smear me and to smear Mr Seselja. In doing so she is smearing the thousands of Canberrans who have been lied to about the performance of their emergency department. She is smearing the many people who have been lost in our hospital system. She is smearing the many people who have come forward to the opposition or gone to the media about their shabby treatment in a system in decline. She has smeared people like Holly and Kate Chaloner, who are here today, after their grandmother died following an operation on her wrong hip. The Chief Minister wants to deal in smear and not address the facts. We will address the facts.
It is not surprising that the Greens are simply apologists for the Chief Minister. I note Caroline Le Couteur is not here. I had a conversation with Caroline Le Couteur at the Property Council ball prior to going in. She admitted to me that this is a very serious issue; this is bad. She recognised the seriousness of the situation, but said to me, “We simply can’t afford”—that being the Greens—“to have a change of Chief Minister or the government this close to the election.” The Greens know full well that this is outrageous. They know full well how badly this Chief Minister has performed. But they have decided, for political reasons, to go in lockstep behind the Labor Party because that is what suits them politically.
I commend Mr Seselja for bringing this forward. He has done it for a number of reasons. The first—and I think it is of particular note—is the scandal in our emergency department. The Auditor-General found there had been a decline in performance over a decade. The Auditor-General found that there had been a massive fabrication, a lie told to the community, about the performance of their emergency department.
We then had the deception from the Chief Minister about her relationship with the individual who doctored the information. Let us be very clear: the individual who doctored the information in 2010, when she started doing it, also went on an extended holiday with the Chief Minister to the south of France, to the same house, and the Chief Minister did not tell the community about that for months. She perpetuated the lie that she simply had a professional relationship with that individual. It does not pass the commonsense test—it simply does not—and that is why the media and the community have drawn such attention to this issue.
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