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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 6 Hansard (18 June) . . Page.. 1737 ..

Mr Humphries: Nonsense! That is just rhetoric, and you know it.

MR WHITECROSS: It is not just rhetoric; it is in your own report. It is in the Graham report. You should go off and read it, Mr Humphries, instead of just talking nonsense. It is in your own report. Over the last 21/2 years you have been systematically downgrading public transport in the ACT. It rings very hollow for the Government now to claim that they are suddenly concerned about improving the quality of public transport in the ACT, and it rings pretty hollow for them to be suggesting that improving public transport is at the heart of this proposal. At the heart of this proposal is introducing private operators into the Canberra market. I urge the members of the crossbenches to consider carefully what they are going to do when this report comes back in August and what they are going to do when the Government makes further requests for similar trials in the future.

Motion, as amended, agreed to.

LAND (PLANNING AND ENVIRONMENT) (AMENDMENT) BILL 1997

Debate resumed from 9 April 1997, on motion by Ms Horodny:

That this Bill be agreed to in principle.

Debate (on motion by Mr Humphries) adjourned.

LIQUOR TRADING HOURS

MR MOORE (12.21): Mr Speaker, I move:

That the Assembly requires the government to remove the 4 a.m. restrictions on the hours of liquor trading currently imposed on ACT businesses.

The question that this raises for us is how we make policy in this ACT Assembly, how each and every one of us in this Assembly goes about the policy process. There is a series of ways we can do it. We can do it just on gut reaction, we can do it in response to pressure groups, or we can base our decisions on solid, sensible research. When I speak about gut reaction, I think in some ways it is a bit unfair to suggest that that is in some way in isolation from other information, because a gut reaction in terms of policy takes into account information that we have already had from dealing with a range of people. It takes in an interpretation on a personal level of a range of pieces of information that have come to us, and it relies, of course, on our own personal understanding of community feeling.

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