Page 1292 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 23 August 1989
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recommended to Concrete Constructions when they originally started looking at this site, when they made the mistake of spending too much money on the particular site.
And when we look at saving them $7m, if you go ahead and allow a office building there, just remember that in two years, in two short years, that $7m loss will have been transferred in extra money to the ACT. So let us debate this rationally; let us resolve the impasse. I am saying to the Minister, "Yes, resolve the impasse, but understand the ramifications of what you are doing".
MR COLLAERY (5.55): Mr Speaker, I will be brief. I have had the benefit of listening to all the speeches first, for once, and I have also had the benefit of the Deputy Chief Minister's rhetoric and his speech, because his performances fall into two categories: the first part, the rhetoric, where he got at the Rally again, and of course at me personally; and the continuing interjections about the proposal that there be a school for the site, which relates to a proposal that Mr Jensen and I put to him by way of example that the site could be used by Concrete Constructions for multiple purposes. Of course, we all heard, some of us with deep shame, references to that at the master builders' dinner at Parliament House and comments also about Asian students, in a context which I was deeply saddened, as were many with me, to hear.
I will come back to the proposal for a school and I will help the Deputy Chief Minister, in my new style of being understanding and persuasive, to understand his own self so that, in approaching his task in the time that he has left with us, he will fully understand the role of the Rally. The Rally is a community based grouping. It arose out of planning issues. Planners have come to sit in this Assembly and hear the debate today.
Whatever you make of the arguments to and fro - and they have been put in very clear detail by my colleague Mr Moore - the fact is that an undeniably substantial proportion of the population have planning as one of their motivating influences in supporting the Rally. Many of those people are stalwart members of this community, and it may surprise the Deputy Chief Minister that support comes across the spectrum on those issues. The Deputy Chief Minister should realise that here was an opportunity again for us to try to develop a bipartisan approach to the excellent motion put forward by my colleague Mr Kaine. Instead, there has been an attempt to rattle the Rally, to get it going off course, and to get it to fall into the personality responses that the Deputy Chief Minister wanted me to. I will not - - -
Mr Whalan One point of order, Mr Speaker; the present speaker is misrepresenting the facts of the situation. The personal, libellous, mendacious attack was made by Mr Moore on me. If there was any response at all - is he so thin-skinned as to think that I have been attacking the
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