Page 5892 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 7 December 2011
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publicly denounce the federal Liberal scheme to sack Canberrans. They have checked the word “scheme” and apparently it comes down to a semantics debate—“We can’t support it because you’ve used the word ‘scheme’.” “Scheme” simply means “plan”. It means “policy”.
I do not think anybody is doubting there will be job losses in this mini budget. Mr Barr thinks it is only 300. I think he is wrong. Nadine Flood thinks it is 3,000, and I have not heard too many people decry that number. But the government say it comes down to the fact that the Liberals have not put forward a proposal that the government can agree to. But with job losses looming over Canberra, the government, with their seven members and 20,000 public servants to back them up, cannot come up with a single amendment to the motion. There is no effort on the part of the government to amend this motion to put it into a satisfactory format, let alone any indication that they want it amended.
We all know how the system works: it goes on the notice paper and the members go to the committee that sets the procedure for today. Everybody has had it from mid-afternoon yesterday, but in the 24 hours that the government has known about it not one of them had the commitment, the passion or the caring in their souls to come up with an amendment that says, “We don’t want these cuts.” There was not an ounce of effort on the part of—what did Mary Porter call it?—the party for jobs.
It is impossible to take the Chief Minister seriously. I did not hear her once say: “I denounce these cuts. I condemn these cuts.” Clearly she does not. She will not take her federal colleagues on and say no. Indeed, she is backed up by the Greens. Ms Hunter’s amendment does not condemn the Labor Party for their cuts. There is no denouncement of the Labor Party’s cuts, because, of course, the Greens would not do that; you do not do that to your coalition allies. Liberal cuts are bad but Labor cuts apparently are okay, according to the Greens. That is the problem: the double standard from Ms Hunter and the hypocrisy of the Greens’ position on this is quite amazing. This is the get out of jail card paid by the Greens for the Labor Party.
Ms Hunter started by saying, “We all recognise the impact.” Then why won’t you denounce that impact, as you were so keen to do in August? It is because of the double standard that exists: “We will not denounce anything the Labor Party does. We will not denounce anything this Chief Minister does, because we are in this cosy, snug, Greens-Labor alliance and we don’t care about the jobs that will be lost in the ACT. We endorse the lies”—that is, the lie that was taken to the last federal election by the Labor members that there would be no cuts.
But those cuts are about to occur. There have been cuts in the past, but more are coming. That is the way the Labor Party operates, and the Greens are complicit in that deception. The Greens are complicit in that lie that was taken to the last election. When Ms Hunter was speaking, I actually thought it was a motion condemning the Liberal Party. I do not think Ms Hunter has put any effort or any thought into what the Labor Party is doing here, and she is about to, yet again, let her colleague Ms Gallagher off the hook. Ms Hunter did not condemn the federal Labor Party. Ms Gallagher did not condemn the federal Labor Party. So one can only assume they are happy with these cuts.
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