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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2297 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

Mr Rugendyke, rather than going down this path, might like to consider bringing in a bill to repeal that act.

Mr Kaine raised another valid point-that it is a bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face. I think it would be a tragedy if this government falls over this budget because I think this is the best budget I have seen since we have had self-government. We are actually going into the black, and there are some very good things in it. But if we fall over this budget the Labor Party becomes the government, and guess what? Unlike this government, where at least four out of seven of us oppose the shooting gallery, all six of them voted for it. So you are not going to get any real benefit there. So there are those practicalities there.

Whilst I respect Mr Rugendyke's great sincerity in this, I think he is going down the wrong path. He probably has not thought through a couple of salient and terribly important conventions and also practicalities relating to this matter.

MR QUINLAN (6.11): Mr Speaker, I was not going to enter this debate but I want to comment on one point that was made by, I think, Mr Rugendyke, and confirmed by Mr Osborne, about the principle that they are standing by and that we should vote for this budget because we voted for the shooting gallery. There is a little hole somewhere in that logic.

There is a lot in this budget that we do not agree with and therefore we do not feel disposed to support it. To support it is to endorse everything in it. The shooting gallery has become the cause celebre of a couple of people in the place and it was something that we voted for. It is crazy logic to suggest that, nevertheless, we should turn around and reverse our position on the whole budget in order to accommodate that particular position when, in Mr Rugendyke's case, the government is in place because of his vote. Effectively, we have a conservative government in the ACT because there are more conservatives in this place than there are progressives.

MR MOORE (Minister for Health and Community Care) (6.13): Mr Speaker, I think it is very interesting that Mr Stanhope started his speech criticising the Canberra Hospital by quoting an article from the Canberra Times that was based on an anonymous nurse who left the hospital 15 months ago. It is bad enough that a journalist should write that in the first place and use those sorts of claims from an anonymous nurse who left the hospital 18 months ago, but to put that as a crisis of the hospital-

Mr Stanhope: After the way you treated Jeans, can you blame her? After your vicious attacks on Jeans?

MR MOORE: Mr Stanhope now interjects, "After the vicious way that you treated Dr Jeans." My vicious way of treating Dr Jeans was to say-

Mr Stanhope: All those lies you told about him the other day.

MR MOORE: He will need to withdraw that, Mr Speaker.

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