Page 35 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 14 February 2012
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MR SPEAKER: Mr Seselja, try and stay away from the term “lies”.
MR SESELJA: make savings and they could not back it up. It just was not true, Mr Speaker. They deserve to be censured for this because they have wasted millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money and they have eroded their credibility for every future project that they promise or that they claim they will be able to deliver.
When the government comes in with the budget this year and they give us their assumptions, even more than usually we will now have to look at them all extraordinarily sceptically. We will have to say: “On what are you basing those assumptions? Is it something you have put together to try and justify your case or are these real and genuine assumptions?” They have put public servants in a difficult position because they have pushed them out peddling false information. I do not know who is responsible for that but in the end the ministers are responsible.
We do not know which way it was going. But they went out there and they put that information out there. They must have known it not to be true. If they did not, they lack competence. If they thought it to be true, they certainly would not be walking away from it now. The way that they have backflipped on this and the way that they have walked away from this project simply confirm the fact that they were not telling the truth. It confirms what we suspected, that they were making it up as they were going along and in doing so they wasted millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.
Mr Speaker, for this they should be censured. For this, the people of Canberra should look very sceptically at every promise that is made by this government and by the Labor Party moving forward.
MR BARR (Molonglo—Deputy Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Economic Development and Minister for Tourism, Sport and Recreation) (12.04): It goes without saying that the government will not be supporting this censure motion. It is part of a fairly common pattern of behaviour by the Leader of the Opposition to be moving a censure motion, a baseless censure motion, essentially in every sitting period. One would not need to have too much imagination to envisage that in every sitting fortnight in the remainder of this Assembly, we will see some sort of concocted rubbish from the Leader of the Opposition seeking to censure the government.
That it happens today, on a day when the Leader of the Opposition is embarrassed by his failure to be able to administer the only thing that he has any responsibility for administering, and that is his own staff—his abject failure over a number of years to be able to do even that most basic of tasks—puts paid to any credibility the Leader of the Opposition might have on any issue of public policy in this territory.
Mr Smyth: Point of order, Mr Speaker. Is the minister going to debate the motion?
MR SPEAKER: There is no point of order at this stage, Mr Barr, but do come to the motion.
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