Page 1345 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 24 March 2010
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report, what did they say? They gave her absolutely no backing for her position. In their paper they said, “There is no assurance over the independent transfer of the value attributed to Calvary hospital or the associated accounting treatment.” Further, they said:
… key elements of the data and assumptions are based on information received from ACT Health and were not validated by Treasury.
And so on and so on. Mr Stanhope has raised arguments that you would not invest in a rental property. If that was a rental property you were due to inherit and you were guaranteed to live in it for 88 years and pay no rent, I think that you can invest in it.
This has caused significant disquiet and disruption in the community, and I have referred to that. We can list countless organisations and groups that have spoken out against this and individuals in the community who have railed against it, and rightly so. Even members of the Labor Party—John Hargreaves and Wayne Berry; one from the right faction and one from the left faction—have said that the proposal was flawed, because it was. We know that the government is conducting further secret negotiations. We only found out about this because of Mrs Dunne’s question in question time last week. Let us not pretend that the government has been open and accountable about this. Because Mrs Dunne asked a question in question time we found out what was going on.
Mr Stanhope says in the media, “It’s very unfair; you shouldn’t ask Ms Gallagher so many questions.” If she stopped hiding the truth and was more honest with the community then maybe that would be the case. The only way that we can get to the bottom of what this government is doing is by asking the hard questions, by probing, by inquiring and by demanding answers. The opposition will continue to put the pressure on this government to make sure that the community knows what it is doing behind closed doors. When he was in opposition Mr Stanhope said:
Governments must be scrutinised. They must be accountable. This is a role of oppositions, and it is a role that is particularly necessary as governments become lazy, arrogant, aloof and accident prone.
What prophetic words, Madam Deputy Speaker. That is exactly what this opposition is doing. That is why Mr Stanhope goes out there in the media trying to spin it any way he can, because he does not like the fact that the hard work that the Liberal opposition is doing in the Assembly is getting to the bottom of what is going wrong.
Again, the government have provided a single option to be considered. I noticed in relation to the Tharwa bridge consultation that they at least presented four options for Tharwa bridge. We can do it for a bridge, but we cannot do it for something as big as this, something that is going to cost in the order of $77 million. Once again, I think we are starting to see why this process is so flawed. We saw the spin from the government that they were going to look at all the different options. Remember that when the deal fell over he said, “Now we are going to go to the drawing board and look at other options, including compulsory acquisition and the status quo.”
It looked at that stage that we were going to see a broad range of options to be considered by the community. Certainly, a lot of options have been put on the table by people like Tony Harris and others. But what we see again is simply a single option being discussed behind closed doors. Here we are again—it is like deja vu—going through a process that has occurred before in this place.
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