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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 5 Hansard (26 August) . . Page.. 1381 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

and no doubt that may have something to do with the fact that I have a rather ambitious program over the next little while. The first issue here is the issue of public servants being used to develop this program. No public servants were used to develop this program other than LA(MS) staff, the same as you are entitled to. In this case I used one person, in fact my assistant. Many of you know him. He did almost all the work on this.

That is an interesting point, because the Leader of the Opposition stood there and berated me for using my ministerial staff for doing this job. The reality is that the Leader of the Opposition has significantly more staff than I do. We would expect him to use his staff to prepare a legislative program and show the rest of the Assembly what he is planning to do, if indeed he is planning to do anything, if indeed he is prepared to remain consistent with his words I quoted during the debate on the suspension of standing orders.

The difficulty is that Mr Stanhope is a true conservative. The reason that he is a true conservative is that he does not like change. He likes things to be done exactly the way they were, without any modification at all, and he simply cannot wrap his mind around the fact that there are some things that are happening differently in this Assembly. The Labor Party would dearly like it to be the same as a coalition, because they are used to dealing with that. They know how to deal with coalitions on the hill, so they would know how to deal with a coalition. This is clearly not a coalition. In fact, at the very ministerial conferences that were raised by those on the other side of the house, Ministers have all commented to me, "This is a very interesting situation". Ministers from coalition governments around Australia recognise this as being an entirely different situation, because that is what it is. It is not a coalition. You know it. It suits you to try to manage it as a coalition.

Mr Stanhope also raised the issue of the health system. Mr Stanhope knows very well that I work many hours and very vigorously on that health system, and I will continue to do so. That does not prevent me from using my capacity to do some other work as well. In fact, that is what I am doing. I am using that capacity to be able to do it. If he wants to put in the hours, if he wants to put in the effort, if the Opposition wants to put in the effort, instead of chasing stupid censure motions that use up all the time here, and work to do what Mr Stanhope said you would do, which is work in a cooperative way, then we might get somewhere in developing an appropriate outcome from this Assembly. Instead, we get the pathetic leadership of Jon Stanhope and the way he operates. What has he achieved as Leader of the Opposition? I think it is time to ask. When at one stage a journalist ready to write a piece for "Forum" in Saturday's Canberra Times came to me and said, "How has Jon Stanhope been performing as Leader of the Opposition?" I argued very strongly - and they can check this out - that he was entitled to a honeymoon period; that that writer ought not to be harsh on the Leader of the Opposition as somebody who had just landed in the Assembly and taken on new responsibilities. He has had his honeymoon period.

Has Jon Stanhope managed to be a decent Opposition Leader? Has he managed to do what he promised he would do in that first speech in the Assembly? The answer is clearly no. Cooperative, collaborative? No, Jon Stanhope. What have you done about leading Labor to a different approach? No, Jon Stanhope, you have done nothing

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