Page 4509 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 18 October 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
How about we stop trying to crucify people and instead say: “Okay, what are the issues for these people at the coalface? Where can we improve things here?” One of the ways to do it is to get some experts to have a look into it—and that is exactly what happened. The child protection and child welfare services in this town have been reviewed and reviewed and reviewed—and so they should be. It is one of the most delicate and difficult parts of governance in this territory. It is the most difficult thing for anybody to administer. It is the most heart-rending one of them all when you are dealing with children. We should not be trying to make political capital out of this. When somebody identifies an issue, we should be all getting together and saying, “How can we fix that?” not “How can we take a scalp for it?” In my view that is reprehensible.
For my own part I congratulate the minister on having the courage to set this review in motion knowing full well what it was going to reveal but not knowing the depth of it and for having the courage to put it out there in the public arena as quickly as she did.
Mrs Dunne: She didn’t. The Speaker did.
MR HARGREAVES: I am not interested in the innate ramblings of lip-quiverers across the chamber. Mrs Dunne would do well to keep her inane comments to herself. She has had her time; she has it coming again—and she will also have it coming again in the next election.
Instead of having a go at this minister we should be saying: “Thanks very much for giving us the information. Now what are you going to do about it?” That should be sufficient. This motion of no confidence is just political opportunism and should be regarded as such and dealt with as such.
MR HANSON (Molonglo) (12.02): I commend Mrs Dunne for bringing this motion before the Assembly. What I have heard was a compelling case made by Mrs Dunne, Mr Seselja and Mr Smyth. Indeed, I think Meredith Hunter has made the case and has found the minister guilty. We disagree with the punishment and the penalty, but it is clear that, aside from the Labor Party, the parties agree that the minister has failed, has acted negligently and is deserving of punishment. The disagreement is on what that punishment should be.
What we have heard from Labor is straight out of the Labor play book—that is, to attack. Rather than spend time defending Ms Burch, what we heard from John Hargreaves and Katy Gallagher was an extraordinary attack on Mrs Dunne, accusing her of being a lip-quiverer because she gets passionate about these issues. It is no different from the sort of attack we see from Julia Gillard. She just repeatedly attacks Tony Abbott as though her gross negligence and mismanagement at the federal level is his fault. What we are seeing here is the same—we see gross negligence from a minister in the ACT government and then simply an attack on the opposition.
Well, this is a government that has had 10 years. It has had the Vardon report. It has run out of excuses. What we see here is a minister with a competence problem and a
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video