Page 4622 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 19 October 2011
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to be done if we are to address the issues of appropriate accommodation for the government legal services.
I think what we are seeing here today is another act of desperation on behalf of the Greens. The Greens came in here at the peak of their political potency—
Mr Coe: Top of the bell curve.
MRS DUNNE: Top of the bell curve, thank you, Mr Coe. They are sitting there saying: “We came in here as third-party insurance. We are going to keep these people honest.” We are a year out from the election. Yesterday was the third anniversary of the 2008 election, and what have we got to see from the Greens since then? There is a lot of “we’re gonna; we’re gonna do this”. We had Ms Le Couteur yesterday lamenting the fact that we did not have a green bin system.
What has it done for them to be in coalition with the Labor Party? They spend their time being fobbed off. Mr Rattenbury, to his credit, has been on the ball in relation to community legal centres. He has had papers and he has had motions. He has got another motion here today but it does not amount to a hill of beans because he has not actually achieved anything for the community legal centres. So the community has not ended up with anything out of this arrangement with the Greens and the Labor Party, and the Greens are starting to get nervous.
What we are going to see is Mr Rattenbury go out with a little press release. There will be a pamphlet that goes out that says what they have done for the community legal centres and what it is is a whole lot of talk. It is the same as when the Greens went out after six months or a year and saying what they had achieved in the Legislative Assembly. One of their big achievements was in fact a piece of legislation drafted by me.
They claimed that they had instituted FOI reform in the ACT. Yes, they did vote for it—some of it—and they did support some of it, but it was not their work. They have very little to show for being in the Legislative Assembly for three years, and they are nervous. They are nervous about their record. For some of those people who know that they will not be back at the end of 2012, they are very nervous indeed.
Mr Rattenbury is there trying to show how much he can achieve for his faction within the Greens and really all he wants is a few platitudinous motions. What we actually need for the community legal services is action. What we actually need is action. The attorney needs to be condemned for this as well, because in 2008 and 2009 he was hot to trot. He was going to do something about community legal centres. It was the next big thing he was going to do.
I have written to him on this matter on a number of occasions. He wrote back to me before the budget last year saying that this again was the next big thing. He said, “I agree that in order for the centres to provide an effective work environment for staff and the best services possible for clients, the centres need appropriate accommodation, but unfortunately there are no community or government premises available at the present time to meet the needs of the community centres.” He went on to say that the
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