Page 260 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 December 2008
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The program gives business the assurance of significant levels of work that will come from this government. These investments will add to the productive capacity of the territory and they will also directly translate into jobs for the private sector during design and construction phases.
Everyone can read about this in budget paper No 5, which provides a detailed list of our capital program over the next four years. We created this capacity to do this and we will spend the surpluses wisely on investments that add to our economic capacity, which is perhaps more relevant now than it has ever been.
In short, I think you can see that the government will not be supporting Mr Smyth’s motion. It is incorrect in almost every aspect of its formulation. I hope that I have addressed the matters to a sufficient level in the Assembly.
Standing orders—suspension
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (5.49): I move:
That so much of the standing and temporary orders be suspended as would prevent completion of debate on notices Nos 12 and 13, private members’ business.
This motion for the suspension of standing orders, if it succeeds, will mean that we will not go to the adjournment debate at 6 o’clock; rather, we will complete the important business on the paper today.
The Liberal opposition has made some strong commitments to members of the Assembly to work hard to ensure that the business on private members’ days is completed on every private members’ day. We need to start today and to carry through with this. There is substantial business. We would envisage that this may not happen on every private members’ day but there was a substantial amount of work that was unscheduled or would not normally be scheduled, including inaugural speeches, and the introduction of an inordinately large number of bills that took up a large amount of time.
The matters being brought forward by non-executive members today are very important. Therefore, it is important that we take the time to get to the end of the notice paper. It will mean that we might have to sit through until half past seven to get these matters addressed. It is very important that we start this new norm in the ACT Assembly—everyone talks about the new norm—as we mean to go on. In the same way that we have committed ourselves to openness and accountability and to better scrutiny, that scrutiny starts, probably most importantly, on private members’ day, when the majority of members of this Assembly get a chance to have a say and to raise issues which are important not just to the Labor Party but to the entire community.
These are the issues that should be addressed, and that is why we seek to suspend the standing orders in order to allow us to finish the debate on the ACT economy and the recession and on the important issue of health performance indicators and the need for
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