Page 5151 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 28 November 2017
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The Greens are so full of contradictions. I have never heard the Greens come in here and say that people who push drugs should have their industry completely stopped. No, they roll out pill testing. We do not hear that prostitution should be curtailed because of the clear and evident harm it does to women and children. We do not hear the government coming in here and saying that illegal bikie gangs should be unarmed, dispersed and stopped. No, all this government and this minister—a former minister of religion—can say is that that those things are a choice and the choice is apparently sacrosanct, except when to comes to greyhounds.
All this government is is a bunch of university elitists, controlled by the more lunatic Greens fringe. They are destroying an industry run by good Canberrans who love their dogs and who have always run a clean outfit here. The government is running them out of town saying, “You have no place in our moral dictatorship.” This is the price we all pay for Labor-Greens government, and doesn’t the minister know it!
I spoke with the workers, the 50 or so workers of the greyhound industry, who love their dogs, who love their families and who honestly are not only having their jobs pulled out from under their feet but who are being turned into subjects of ridicule and disgust in the community by a government that has unleashed such lies about them that it is now hard for them to find jobs in other areas.
You can shake your head, Ms Cheyne, but that is their experience. They have applied for jobs, been offered them and then been denied them because of their contacts with this industry, this industry which here in the ACT has been following the law and following good practice as best it can.
This is so un-Australian. This is about lies. This is about a government who is clinging on to power in its 15th year. It is like the movie The Castle, except in this version the ALP and the Greens evict Dale from his house and send him packing because they do not like the way his house looks, they do not like the dogs that he keeps and they do not like the way that his dogs love to race.
It has been said in this place before that Giulia Jones understands the value of unions—good unions—and yes I do. I can say as someone who has worked as a union organiser and as a national representative of a union in this country, that the ALP is now doing to the members of the AWU—law-abiding trainers and lovers of dogs—exactly what they did to me.
But I have some older values. I still think that family matters. Because I still believe that people deserve a fair go from conception to their natural grave that it is not up to government to pick winners, to pick whose sport or work is good enough for its elitist views.
I applaud the AWU and the Canberra public who attended yesterday’s rally. I think it is not so strange that the ALP did not have a single MLA in attendance. Yet the Liberals had five representatives there, because politics has changed. We on this side of the chamber are not a dictatorship. We do not tell people how to behave. We do not force people against their conscience. We value freedom and we see ordinary people
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