Page 577 - Week 02 - Thursday, 19 February 2015
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Mr Corbell: It is not; it is executive business.
MR HANSON: Executive business? Well, raise a motion of this sort in executive business. It seems odd to me that the highest priority that the Chief Minister has in bringing this motion before the Assembly today is that he wants to talk about an issue that is clearly within the federal domain. We should all understand what is occurring here. Let us be quite realistic about it. This is an attempt at a political wedge by the Chief Minister. He thinks there is some opportunity here. The Prince Philip decision by the Prime Minister did not go down well so he thought, “Let’s try and conflate this and make it a local issue.”
It is a pretty cheap, tawdry thing to do, and there are certainly people who may be collateral damage out of this. This is the sort of behaviour that you would expect from someone at university, perhaps from the Labor right, debating university politics. It is the sort of thing that we would have seen from Mr Barr back in his student politics days: “Let’s have a bit of a wedge issue. Let’s try and get a political battle going.”
This is not the sort of thing I would contend is going to help the people of the ACT in their day-to-day lives. It is not going to fix the budget. It is not going to address the fact that in our health system we have the lowest, in Australia, satisfaction from health consumers. It is not going to fix the kids that are in schools that do not have adequate schooling and so on.
I would compare this deliberate attempt at a political wedge, which is clearly a nonsense, wally motion—and that is what it is—with some of the issues of concern that the opposition have been putting forward over the last couple of weeks. We have seen Mr Doszpot in this place talking about issues that really matter to Canberrans and really matter to schoolchildren.
Mr Corbell: On a point of order—
MR HANSON: Can you stop the clock, please?
MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Stop the clock, please. Mr Corbell, on a point of order.
Mr Corbell: Madam Deputy Speaker, the point of order is on relevance. The motion before us is in relation to the Order of Australia and how the decision by Prime Minister Abbott to create the imperial designation of knights and dames has proven extremely divisive within our community and devalued the awards previously conferred under the existing system to many Canberrans. Whilst I appreciate that Mr Hanson would like to distance himself from his federal political leader on these points, he still has to remain relevant to the motion and he has to address the points set out in the motion. You just cannot—
Ms Jones: I think this is a speech, actually. Is this a speech by Mr Corbell?
MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Excuse me, Mrs Jones.
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