Page 1619 - Week 08 - Thursday, 28 September 1989
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MR COLLAERY: I will give him a job, Mr Speaker, as my altar boy. The trade union movement is not, as this Deputy Chief Minister knows, united on this issue. That will be a matter which will become evident during the course of the debate before the Social Policy Committee of this Assembly. What we have done is to return the water supply to what it was when nature provided it to the people of Canberra - more or less it is there.
Mr Berry: Don't forget the chlorine. We have left the chlorine in there.
MR COLLAERY: With a little more chlorine. But our policy, in terms of a mandate, has been publicised. It has been available. Part of the Rally's objectives in securing government was to ban fluoride. That has been known to the Deputy Chief Minister because he went through our policies very carefully before 11 May and he made clear to me on a number of occasions, Mr Speaker, that he saw nothing in the Residents Rally's policies that the Labor Party really strongly disagreed with.
Mr Whalan: That is not right. That is mendacious.
MR COLLAERY: It is very interesting that the Residents Rally's policies did not at that time anticipate that the word "mendacious" would be so important to the maintenance of debate in this chamber.
Mr Whalan: At least you pronounce it correctly.
MR COLLAERY: I did not go to school in Newcastle, Mr Speaker, and I do have these pronunciation problems.
I refer to the trade union movement in Bendigo. Bendigo is a place that suffered from cyanide effects from the goldmining there over the years. It is a very conscious trade union environment. When the Labor Minister in Victoria - the then Minister, of course, because most of them are "thens" - Mr Roper, decided, on coming into office, to charge into fluoride, he got a closed door in Bendigo, did he not? The Deputy Chief Minister knows this. He knows it, and he is obviously going to redeem himself before the Social Policy Committee. Given his great technical expertise in this subject, he will no doubt volunteer to appear before that committee.
Mr Speaker, the Rally supports the motions put forward by Dr Kinloch today, principally because they fit a proper process in this Assembly. The process that the Rally adopted from the start was to ban fluoride. We have not wimped on our policy. We have not wimped on our policy about Monash Drive and a number of other issues that may well lose us some votes. We have stuck to our policy. We have banned fluoride. You were on notice of that for six, seven, eight months, and as well the Bill lay on the floor here for a whole month.
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