Page 550 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 19 March 2014
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tried banning the sale of puppies.” How terrible we are! If you read that sentence, you would probably go, “That’s a really awful thing to do.” But the truth of the matter was that the Greens introduced amendments to govern the breeding and sale of animals. That included licensing of breeders, limitations on selling cats and dogs except from approved sellers such as licensed breeders and animal welfare organisations, but also permitted pet stores to sell animals if they were facilitating the sale from an animal welfare organisation.
When you actually go to the detail of the matter you can see that we were seeking to eliminate some of the practices that had poor animal welfare outcomes for dogs. But as I have just described, there were quite a few channels through which dogs could still be sold. For Mr Seselja to go out there and say the Greens even tried banning the sale of puppies was, frankly, a complete distortion of the policy. Mr Seselja well knew it. As a lawyer, Mr Seselja well understood the difference. He may not have bothered to read the legislation, so perhaps he was just being ignorant. As he is not here to defend himself, I do not want to go too much into it, but it illustrates the point that the Liberal Party see no boundaries in the way they seek to misrepresent and distort other parties’ policies.
I have another example. In the last Assembly there was another special from Mr Seselja. He said:
Households who cannot afford solar panels will be slugged an extra $225 a year to compensate those who can.
We know that under the feed-in tariff scheme that was running during the last Assembly, 30 megawatts of small and medium-scale solar in the ACT, which was what was permitted and passed through the ICRC pricing process, was costed at around $27 per household per year. Yet I cannot count the number of times that Mr Seselja came to this chamber—I suspect some of his colleagues at the time aided and abetted him on this; I did not have the time to research all the occasions on which they used this—and issued numerous press releases saying, “Canberrans are being slugged $225 a year to pay for this feed-in tariff scheme.” The truth of the matter was that, through ICRC price pass-throughs, the cost was $27 a year, a complete distortion; a complete scare campaign and lacking in integrity in the way that real information should have been used. We can see that truth in campaigns has not been a high priority for the Canberra Liberals.
That brings us to the absolute classic from the last Assembly election—the triple your rates slogan. This was typical use of a partial sentence, something that is very much straight out of the playbook of the Canberra Liberal Party. Partial sentences, partial truths, casual distortion of a party policy, they are all no worries when it comes to the Canberra Liberals.
It seems inevitable that, over the course of times, rates will eventually be triple what they are today. At some point in the future that will inevitably be true. But what the Canberra Liberals sought to insinuate very clearly during the last election campaign was that that would happen in this four-year term. That was undoubtedly the message of their slogan, which was, “The Greens and Labor will triple your rates.” They clearly insinuated it was to be in this term of the Assembly. It was quite clear.
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