Page 5532 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 9 December 2009
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Mr Stanhope: Name one campaign that was party political.
MR SESELJA: I will name a number. We saw the advertising that told us about the achievements of the government through the Canberra plan—how wonderful the ACT Labor government were. Funnily enough, in an election year, we had an advertising campaign to tell us how wonderful they are. The Chief Minister gets out of bed on the wrong side one morning and the LDA has an advertising campaign to tell us how good the land rent scheme is. I could keep going. We heard how wonderful they have been in water. How much did it cost? $700,000-odd.
Mr Stanhope: That’s a statutory authority.
MR SESELJA: A statutory body? The Land Development Agency is meant to be at arm’s length from government but he gets out of bed on the wrong side and the LDA puts an ad out. It is a ridiculous argument. And we see why. He asked me to name one; I have named three.
But we come back to this, Madam Assistant Speaker: 12 months. There was debate in the Assembly, there was a committee process with representatives of all parties and those committee recommendations were responded to in detail by the opposition, with amendments. The government then made a very late response to that committee report and we worked with them to respond to that. There was very little of substance in the government’s response but we worked with them on a couple of the clauses that they have suggested and we have moved on them.
Now Mr Stanhope wants to quibble about one or two matters of detail. It is all about delaying this bill. We will be very happy to have further discussions over the lunch break and come back to this. But we have received agreement from the Greens on our amendments. We have worked very closely with the entire Assembly through the committee process and outside it to get these amendments right. What we have now are very robust amendments and a very robust piece of legislation. Jon Stanhope’s attempts to try and delay this issue by adjourning it, because he simply does not want it to start, do not work. The actual amendment—
Mr Stanhope: I am trying to fix your mistakes, Zed.
MR SESELJA: Your amendment does not do anything other than delay it. That is where we see the government going. The Chief Minister’s amendment, unfortunately, does nothing other than delay the commencement of the bill. It does nothing to address any of the perceived issues that he has put forward.
As I said, we will have discussions over the lunch break on these minor matters of detail. But what we have is a number of amendments that have been through a rigorous process, through a committee process, through a response by government. We have put them forward; we look forward to them passing. We will have the discussions on these issues. Mr Rattenbury has indicated he would like to come back to that, and we look forward to coming back on that and, indeed, on all of the other amendments which have been broadly canvassed and examined in fine detail. We look forward to this legislation passing today.
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