Page 1637 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 1 April 2009
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MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Minister for Transport, Minister for Territory and Municipal Services, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Indigenous Affairs and Minister for the Arts and Heritage) (11.46): The government will oppose this bill. The bill, as drafted, will not achieve its stated purposes. It will have unintended consequences.
I think I probably should put on the record, too, that it has caused me already some significant personal grief. I lost the bet in caucus that the Leader of the Opposition would never bring such a silly bill on because he would not want to make a goose of himself. I bet my caucus colleagues that we would never see this bill debated because the Leader of the Opposition would not want to actually display his appalling ignorance—would not want to make the goose of himself that actually bringing bill forward makes of him.
This is the kind of bill you get when you begin with a politically motivated notion. It is the sort of draft legislation you get when you want to score a cheap point. It is sloppy, lazy and ill-conceived—from an opposition leader who we all know is work shy and here for a good time, not a long time. He is the leader of an opposition whose memory of being in government is so hazy that it cannot remember that 99 per cent of what is done in government has nothing at all to do with the political party one belongs to and everything to do with the community.
That is what government information campaigns do. They inform, they advise and they educate. It may be inconvenient and galling for the Leader of the Opposition to reflect that it will be a Labor government doing this informing over the next four years, but that is no excuse for a bill that is nothing short of a temper tantrum in disguise by a Leader of the Opposition who still has not got used to the fact that he delivered the second worst electoral result that any Liberal leader has ever delivered since self-government—31 per cent. Only Trevor Kaine—rest his soul—actually produced a worse result for the Liberal Party than Mr Seselja managed to deliver at the last election.
The stated purpose of the bill is to prevent the use of public funds for advertising or other communications for party political purposes. What the bill would do is severely impact on the ability of government agencies to effectively provide to the community timely and accessible information on government programs and hinder government efforts to effectively engage the community. If this bill were to be passed in anything like its current form, we might as well abandon any idea of effective health or road safety campaigns, messages about changes to services or even advice about upcoming community consultations.
I will come to the more ridiculous and undergraduate aspects of this bill in a moment. First, I would like to point out that the unexceptional parts of the bill actually reflect current practice. In other words, they are redundant because they simply reflect what we currently do. What a piece of work—a bill in which every clause is absurd, ridiculous or redundant.
Some of the definitions in the bill seem also to be deliberately crafted to create confusion and uncertainty. The definition in the dictionary provided at the end of the
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