Page 797 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 27 February 2013
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and that tends to mostly come from the staid conservatives. But for us to move forward and be prepared for the challenges of the coming century—this is the sort of thing that you often hear us say in this place; but as government, as leaders, we have a responsibility to be thinking about the future—is something that the Greens are very conscious of.
It is quite easy to sit in the place that Mr Hanson does and be very critical of endeavours to implement some of these strategies, but when you are used to being in opposition you do not have to actually take responsibility for some of these matters. It is very easy to put these sorts of motions forward, but the Greens have realised, and come to work with the fact, that when you have responsibility you need to use it wisely. Having now spent four years and a bit on the crossbench, we know we have to play a part in actually delivering some of these things; we have to have serious policies that can work for the community.
One of Mr Hanson’s focuses today is the cost of some of these initiatives. Let us move to some of the rewriting of history that the Liberal Party is seeking to do. Let us go back to the ACT election. The Greens were the party that put all their policies to Treasury for costing. They are all publicly available; they have all been ticked off by Treasury. If we want to talk about being transparent about the cost of things, let us contrast that with the position the Liberal Party took: they waited and waited, and finally, in the last few days, put a rush of policies in, leaving no time for Treasury to work over them properly, leaving no time for the public to be able to access that information.
Where was the transparency to the community about cost? It sat with the Greens; we were the first ones to have all of our policies into the Treasury process. If we want to talk about costings, I am happy to talk about costings all day, because ours are still publicly available and they are fully transparent.
Mr Hanson: It was a billion dollars.
MR RATTENBURY: I will come to the billion dollars. Let us come to that; it is another—
Mr Hanson interjecting—
MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Hanson, will you stop interjecting. You will have your chance to reply shortly.
MR RATTENBURY: It is another rewriting of history; it is another distortion. Mr Barr stole my thunder a bit on this, but I will make the point again, because I think it is one worth making. In his press release in November last year, Mr Seselja talked about the $2 billion deal that had been done between the Labor Party and the Greens. Clearly that was done on the back of a beer mat, or an envelope or something. When you actually looked at the figures, there was some interesting double counting going on there. If I recall correctly, and I have not looked at it for a while, they put in light rail twice—once for the Greens and once for the Labor Party. That took up a lot of the figures.
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