Page 605 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 April 1994
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MINISTER FOR SPORT
Motion of Want of Confidence
Debate resumed.
MS SZUTY (8.00): I would like to remind members, at the commencement of my remarks, of the terms of the motion before the Assembly:
That this Assembly lacks confidence in Minister Berry by reason of his deliberate or reckless misleading of the Assembly concerning matters relating to the ACTTAB's contract with VITAB Limited.
As we have heard, there is quite a history attached to the ACTTAB-VITAB contract. Questions have been asked about it for some considerable time. The matter has been raised by the Liberal Opposition for some months by a process of questions in the Assembly and by press releases, and they have provided both Michael Moore and me with complete documentation about the various pieces of information they have been able to compile over some considerable period.
As a result of all of that, we have two processes, which have been described by various members of this Assembly during the debate today. The first process, or outcome, is the inquiry under the Inquiries Act to be chaired by Professor Dennis Pearce. The terms of reference I had something to do with initially, Madam Speaker, in coming up with a list of questions that I wanted the inquiry to address. That process was similarly embarked on by the Liberals, who came up with their own terms of reference, and the inquiry was very generously taken on by the Chief Minister, Ms Follett. She consulted with members of this Assembly as to who the chair of that inquiry would be and has come up with fairly open terms of reference for the inquiry.
The second part of the process, or outcome, of all the discussions on the ACTTAB-VITAB contract is the motion of no confidence in Minister Berry that we are debating today. It is a question of whether the Minister has deliberately or recklessly misled this Assembly. Questions have also been raised by the Opposition about the competency of Mr Berry for some considerable period of time, starting from about the middle of March, when it was learnt that ACTTAB had been severed from the Victorian TAB superpool. It is interesting that the Liberals have come to view the motion of no confidence in Minister Berry from a background both of misleading the Assembly and of the competence of administration in the first instance.
Madam Speaker, I regard this no-confidence motion as a matter of the utmost gravity and seriousness, and it is one, obviously, with which the Assembly has been struggling today. In tune with the development of the terms of reference for the inquiry under the Inquiries Act, I have given this no-confidence motion the same amount of attention to detail that I have given the drawing up of suggested terms of reference for the inquiry. The consequences for the Minister if the motion is put and carried are of the utmost seriousness. The expectation of the Assembly would be that Minister Berry would resign. If he would not resign, then the Chief Minister would remove Mr Berry from the ministry.
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