Page 2167 - Week 07 - Thursday, 6 June 1991
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Thursday, 6 June 1991
_____________________
MR SPEAKER (Mr Prowse) took the chair at 2.30 pm and read the prayer.
CHIEF MINISTER
Motion of Want of Confidence
MS FOLLETT (Leader of the Opposition) (2.31): I move:
That this Assembly has no confidence in the Chief Minister, Mr Kaine, and his minority Government.
Today members of the Assembly face a choice, and I believe that it is a clear choice. In voting on this motion members can choose to support the neighbourhood school system and to reopen schools closed by the Kaine Government. In voting on this motion members can choose to work towards retaining a public hospital on the Acton Peninsula and restoring our public health system. And in voting on this motion members can choose to protect the community's interest in the commercial leasehold system and avoid handing windfall profits to developers at the community's expense.
To do one or all of these things, the only answer is to pass this motion and then to install a government committed to those policies. To vote against this motion, or to abstain, is to say that you support the choices made by the Kaine Liberal Government without a mandate for those choices and without community support for those choices. Those are the issues which prompted me to move the motion and those are the issues on which I ask members to vote.
Frequently in speaking in this Assembly I have outlined my belief that we need a stated and certain agenda for the ACT. Mr Kaine has presided over a government of chaos and confusion. This Chief Minister and his Education Minister have terrorised those in the community who depend upon and care about the public education system. At first they said that 15 to 25 schools would close. Then the number was reduced to 11 and then to seven.
In the end, of course, four schools have closed, with terrible consequences for the school children, their families and the communities around them. There has been no evidence of stability, of predictability, or of social responsibility in those school closures. We have seen one community set against another; we have seen citizens and parents arrested for their beliefs; we have seen the very
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