Page 5222 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 18 November 2009
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This is an important piece of legislation. Mr Smyth should be commended for his work in bringing this forward, in leading this debate, in calling this minister to task, in taking him to task, on his performance, on his ignoring of the Assembly, on his not complying with the law and on him seeking to take over a board which was always designed to be independent, about which the Assembly clearly expressed a will that it would be independent. Mr Smyth’s amendments are therefore worthy of this Assembly’s support. The division that was expressed there between Ms Gallagher’s position and Mr Barr’s position has to be clarified: Ms Gallagher seemed to be indicating to us that they would be supporting it in principle and we had Mr Barr interjecting across the chamber saying they would not.
This is worth supporting. I know it is embarrassing for Mr Barr. It is embarrassing how it has been handled. But this legislation should now pass. We look forward, based on at least the first contribution from the Labor member, to it passing in principle unanimously, getting the unanimous support of the Assembly, so that we can move on from this saga. It has been poorly handled, but I once again commend Mr Smyth for his very strong work, his significant work, in bringing this legislation forward and we are hopeful that—and all the indications are there—it will become a law of the territory.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.16): I am proud to support Mr Smyth’s bill here today because it is good work; it is the serious hard work that opposition members put into legislation and other matters in this place and it has paid off on this occasion.
We are here today because of petulance on the part of the minister. The minister put forward his massive microeconomic reform that was going to save the territory $50,000, and since then it has been a complete muck-up. It is a complete mess-up by this less than stellar minister, the minister who came into this place with such promise yet in this term of the Assembly we have seen failure after failure. There was the catastrophe of school closures in the last term, but we thought he had got all that behind him. He was given a pretty unpleasant job there but we thought that if he had got it all behind him perhaps he would be able to get on and show what he is really made of.
What is he really made of? We have got the numbers man from the Labor right who cannot count to nine. He cannot read legislation. He is the minister for education who cannot read and who cannot count. What we have had here is what can only be described as an epic stuff-up—that is the normal use of the word “epic”, not the acronym EPIC—and it has been very handy for the subeditors around the ACT because they have been able to talk about Mr Barr’s “EPIC stuff-ups”, with its dual meaning, for quite some time.
Mr Barr was so desperate, when he was thwarted by this Assembly, to stack the board of EPIC that he just simply mucked it up. The minister had access to all the advice he requires and we assume that he took the advice on this matter—and he still got it wrong. He was in a hurry. He was in such a hurry that he made basic errors. He did not check the instruments. No-one between him and the executive and the legislation register checked the instruments, and as a result of that the minister, embarrassingly,
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