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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4299 ..

MRS DUNNE: I am not in your departure lounge. I am quite happy to stay here and serve the people of the ACT, day in and day out-

Mr Corbell: Unlike Mr Pratt, Mr Humphries and Mr Stefaniak.

MRS DUNNE: To make your life as miserable as possible, Mr Corbell.

MR SPEAKER: Order, members! Mrs Dunne has the floor.

MRS DUNNE: It puts a spring in my step every day, when you hear Simon Corbell come in here and spout the platitudinous hypocrisy that we heard here today.

This is a straightforward piece of legislation that the Canberra Liberals endorse and are happy to support. All it does is make life simpler for the Place Names Committee. What it means is that, if they decide to name places after Antarctic explorers, they do not have to go looking for women Antarctic explorers-there probably weren't any, because of the conditions explorers went through. So we are not making onerous demands upon them. But in areas where women excel and where women have made a contribution to the Canberra community and the Australian community, they have an opportunity of having a street named after them.

Mr Speaker, I commend the bill to the house.

MR CORBELL (Minister for Education, Youth and Family Services, Minister for Planning and Minister for Industrial Relations): I seek leave to speak again, Mr Speaker.

Leave granted.

MR CORBELL: I am glad that the spirit of public service inspires Mrs Dunne so much that her sole purpose in being here as an elected member of the Legislative Assembly is to make my life a living hell. I am sure that the electors of Ginninderra would be interested to know that that is why she wants to be in this place.

I am not going to sit quietly and hear the rant I just heard from Mrs Dunne without responding to it. The reason I am not going to sit quietly is that it is absurd and shallow in the extreme to suggest that, because the Labor government is not prepared to support Ms Dundas' amendment, the Labor Party does not have a commitment to any of these issues.

I could recite the achievements of this government and the previous Labor governments in these issues, but I think the record of this party is well known. I am not going to do that, and I am not going to respond to the petty and childish taunts that Mrs Dunne made in her speech.

What I am going to say is this: the government believes that Ms Dundas' bill is well intentioned but unnecessary. It is unnecessary because it is prescriptive. The whole point of the place naming process is that it should not be prescriptive. That is the whole point of the place naming process.

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