Page 2146 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 15 August 2006

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MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Indigenous Affairs and Minister for the Arts): Mr Speaker, I now must make a further personal explanation. That statement—

MR SPEAKER: This could be personal explanations at 10 paces.

MR STANHOPE: It could. Mr Smyth has to stop standing up in this place and failing to tell the truth.

MR SPEAKER: Order! Do you claim to have been misrepresented?

MR STANHOPE: My office gave no such undertaking. As to any claim by Mr Smyth that they did, I should just call it for what it is, a lie, but I will not. It is just not true. Really, you do need, Mr Smyth, to be a little bit careful in what you say in this place or we will have to take the appropriate steps and move a substantive motion against you for your consistent and persistent failure to tell the truth. That is not true. It is not true. It is a lie.

MR PRATT (Brindabella): Mr Speaker, I rise under standing order 46, while we are on the misrepresentation bandwagon—

MR SPEAKER: Leave is granted, Mr Pratt.

MR PRATT: Mr Speaker, this morning the Chief Minister said in a debate that I had voted for, or supported, a motion in a Liberal Party meeting in Canberra supporting the death penalty. He said that. Mr Speaker, my explanation is that I have not, in the ACT Liberal Party, supported or got up and debated a motion about the subject of the introduction of the death penalty. I remind this place also of the Hansard of what I said on 16 November 2005. I commenced the debate by saying:

I rise to speak against the death penalty.

Nowhere in the Hansard representation of that speech on that day is that qualified to any extent; it is as clear as that. I say again, Mr Speaker, that I explained to the house that the position I have stated here is absolutely consistent with everything I have said in Liberal Party meetings in the ACT.

Mr Corbell: We will check that.

MR PRATT: Go for your life.

Mr Stanhope: I apologise to Mr Pratt, Mr Speaker, but I do not withdraw what I said about Mr Stefaniak.

Leave of absence

Motion (by Mrs Dunne) agreed to:


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