Page 2363 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 16 June 2009
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Mr Stanhope: I love these constant reminders of why they sacked you.
MR SMYTH: Here it goes. You can say whatever you want. But the problem for you is you have this problem. We go to the Costello report; we go to this constant stamping of documents. Ted Quinlan did not know there was a Costello report coming. He must have been asleep in cabinet when that one was passed by cabinet. No, cooked up by the Chief Minister, “I’m going to get to the bottom of this. I’m going to have a review, and then I’ll make it cabinet in confidence.” The same with the Ernst & Young review looking for savings in TAMS: “Oh no, we weren’t looking for savings. We’re not looking for efficiency here. We’re just having a review. We’re going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on having a review that will find nothing.” That’s the problem with this government: every time you look at them they are hiding behind something.
It is interesting, Mr Stanhope thinks the asking of questions is little more than a political fishing expedition and that this year’s process simply borders on the absurd. It is not how Mr Hargreaves saw it, because Hargreaves on ABC radio said, ‘It’s not so that the questions were, in fact, trivial. I believe, I think, they were quite reasonable questions.” Who is right here? Sorry, it is a Green-Liberals-CPSU-John Hargreaves conspiracy to get the Chief Minister! John Hargreaves is the last honest, open, accountable man in the ACT.
Mr Seselja: Bill Redpath.
MR SMYTH: Bill Redpath. I forgot about Bill Redpath. Yes, he is there as well. What about the AEU, who criticised the government? Perhaps we will add ACTCOSS, who criticised the government. If you criticise the government, you are somehow the enemy of the state and the shutters go up and the phone calls are made and the attacks begin and the personal denigrations start and the playing of the man continues. We saw it again today with this snide inference that if you ask about overseas staff you must be racist. That is the implication. That is what Mr Stanhope was saying. If you use the word “foreign” or “overseas” you are somehow racist.
If he had sat in on the estimates hearings, or if he had at least paid attention, the Chief Minister would know that there were concerns raised about the ethics of taking trained medical staff from third world countries for our country. The argument was “we can buy them, we can get them here”. But we do not take into consideration what we leave behind. If that is racist, you need to go to talk to the ethics adviser, or you need to have a good hard look at yourself, Chief Minister, and about what you are trying to achieve here in your workers paradise.
The questions were reasonable. In fact, the Minister for Health made the case that they can come here, learn, better themselves and go home to their country of origin so that their country of origin will be better off for their time spent here in the ACT. But when we asked how many had come from the country of origin to the ACT and learned and returned, we were not given an answer. I guess that is another one of the trivial questions that were asked about what effect we as a city have on countries that are less well off than ours. I guess by the Stanhope standard that is a fairly trivial matter.
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