Page 5417 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 November 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
So let us be very clear about this. The record is being corrected today because of the hard work that the opposition has done, in particular the hard work that Mr Coe has done. And this is not a minister who would willingly come into this place and correct the record if it was not that he was forced to, if there was not an absolute necessity because of the truth that has been uncovered. So let us not have any pretence about Mr Corbell trying to do the right thing here. He has been forced, kicking and screaming, to this point by Mr Coe.
I am disappointed again by the Greens. It gets to a point where you do think that perhaps they will come to the point where they realise that they are being hoodwinked by this government, that they are patsies to the Labor Party and that they need to start holding this government to account. But what we are seeing repeatedly is a pattern of behaviour from the Greens, particularly from Meredith Hunter, who, rather than getting up in this place and holding the government to account, spends most of her time, when these issues come up, attacking the opposition and defending the government. I find it extraordinary that a party that prides itself on openness and accountability, that talks about integrity, actually finds any excuse it can to protect its coalition partner as opposed to actually holding them to account.
We have seen these issues with Mr Corbell before. In fact, there was a motion moved in this place by me last year that the Greens would not even allow us to have debated. Remember, this was about the prison capacity, and the Greens would not even allow us to have the debate. So they were not even interested in hearing the debate, let alone finding out whether they were going to support it or not. So the default position from the Greens, sadly, seems to be one of automatically protecting the ministers.
Mr Coe and Mr Seselja have well outlined the issue of the RSPCA. But this is not a single incident. Perhaps if this was the first incident, we would be more forgiving. But I can count nine—nine instances since I have been in this place—where Mr Corbell has misled the community and misled the Assembly. And we can go through them. The RSPCA is a start.
We have then got the issue of the plastic bags and the amount in the legislation, where he was adamant and was ridiculing Mr Seselja about the legislation and was saying: “No, that was in an earlier draft that we talked about $27,500. It is not in the legislation.” He was on the public record. If it were not for the fact that we pursued this issue and we asked him questions repeatedly, he would not have done anything. He squirmed out of it, not in an open, accountable and forgiving way. He then said: “The $27,000 is only if you take us to court. The on-the-spot fine is what we are really talking about.” He was using weasel words to try to get out of the fact that the reality was that, as Mr Seselja had been saying, the fine was $27,500. Mr Corbell had denied that. It was not any sort of open, “Yes, I made a mistake.” It was simply trying to cover it up by trying to confuse the issue by saying, “There is a difference between the on-the-spot fine and the amount if you do go to court.”
We then have the issue that probably has been litigated more times than any other, the jail opening in 2008, on the eve of the ACT election, when Simon Corbell, as the minister responsible, opened a jail which could not receive prisoners, was unable—
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video