Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .
Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 2 Hansard (10 March) . . Page.. 495 ..
Mr Wood
: If the Government wants to send its views out, it does it itself; it is as simple as that.MR HUMPHRIES: No, that is not the case. The Government has the power - as indeed your Government had, Mr Wood - to commission consultants to assist it in developing its views to put before the community. And you did it too, Mr Wood, incidentally.
Mr Wood: No. If we wanted the Government's view, the Government would do it. It was as simple as that.
MR HUMPHRIES: Yes, you did, Mr Wood. It was not about whether we should have rural residential. It was a discussion paper about how to implement rural residential, in effect. It was a study about rural residential development in the ACT, issues to do with the development of that concept.
Mr Speaker, Mr Wood raises a question about independence of reports. Let me just draw Mr Wood's attention to what happens when independent reports are produced by a government which does not like those reports and does not want to deal with them. We at least have put this report on the table. What happened to the McBeth report, Mr Wood?
Mr Stanhope: It is your report.
MR HUMPHRIES: No, it is not. It was your report. The McBeth report was your report. The Follett Government produced a report, which came to it in September of 1994, about fire hazard reduction practices in the ACT, and what did you do about it? You suppressed it. You suppressed the report. It did not conform with the Government's views. So you suppressed it. You put it in a bottom drawer, where it lay until March 1995, when this Government came to office and had to produce it. That is what happened to it.
We take a different approach in this Government. We believe that the work that is being done by consultants at the expense of the ACT community has a role to play in informing public debate. But, of course, it has to be put on the table with the proviso that the Government is not going to commission consultants to, in effect, provide for a hampering of the process which has been begun by the Government and which has been supported by the Assembly.
Mr Stanhope: You can't possibly believe this, Gary.
MR HUMPHRIES
: I absolutely do, Mr Stanhope, and when you are in government one day - and let us suspend disbelief and pretend that it will happen one day - you will do precisely the same thing. Believe it or not, Mr Stanhope; you will ask consultants for views sometimes which you do not agree with. If you are pretending to me that you are going to just put this on the table without any modification and say, "Oh, we have got
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .