Page 1031 - Week 06 - Thursday, 27 July 1989
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Australian Labor Party. Mr Speaker, the fact of the matter is that the planning function has been largely ignored in this debate.
When visitors come down Northbourne Avenue in future, on their left as they come to City Hill they will see the casino with the lights and the girlie legs kicking out, and then they will look over the hill and they will see the tripod and the mast for our national Parliament site. That is a sad situation to present to visitors to our city. It is wrong. It is fundamentally wrong.
The worst thing of all in this debate is that there is probably one man largely responsible for pushing this casino onto this city. He is sitting opposite me. He has been an adviser to five Federal Labor Ministers. The decision here represents an ideological defeat for the left wing of the Labor Party. ACOSS and other good Labor supporters have firmly opposed the building of this casino.
I was just looking at a book, Mr Speaker, to give me some inspiration. It is a book by an academic, entitled Isolationism and Appeasement in Australia. I was looking at the performance of the Australian Labor Party between the wars, especially during the depression, and saw how, for a while, a large group of the right wingers in the Labor Party saw nothing wrong with the invasion of Abyssinia, the rise of Nazism and the rest, because those regimes were giving jobs, and the people fell for that sucker line.
And we hear it again. We heard it again on the radio this morning. What a sucker line; what a miserable argument to put to people who are needing jobs; what a way to use and manipulate people and the unions at the moment! And it is no coincidence that we have seen the BWIU out here, the entrepreneurial union of the day with its $30m planned development in Dickson.
Mr Speaker, this casino issue really links Federal Labor and now Territory Labor in its full image; that is, it is a gambling government, and we know that. From top to bottom, the Australian Labor Party now is under the control of the right wing gambling element. The outcome of the Select Committee on the Establishment of a Casino is a three to two vote. Any lawyers know that if you get a three to two vote in the High Court you do not really accept that verdict; you run it again next time. The fact is, Mr Speaker, that is not a conclusive vote at all. Three to two is a qualified result.
Mr Speaker, the other thing - and I warn my friends opposite me and on my right - is that the Residents Rally scored, I believe, in all but one of the polling booths in inner Canberra in the recent election, all but Deakin, and this decision and the decision to go forward with this will push us further out into the suburbs in our areas of support. But we do not wish to gain support out of this outrageous impost on the community. The Rally does not
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