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Legislative Council - Fifty-First Parliament, Third Session (51-3)
2009-09-09 Daily Xml
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LIBERAL PARTY

The Hon. B.V. FINNIGAN (16:27): Given that the Hon. Mr Wortley, my colleague, decided to eschew party political matters today, I am happy to make up the deficiency in my own contribution. I offer congratulations to Mrs Isobel Redmond, the member for Heysen in another place, and Mr Steven Griffiths, the member for Goyder in another place, on their elevation to the leadership and deputy leadership of the Liberal Party.

One could be forgiven for thinking that they were elected to the leadership of a monastery to begin with because they seemed to go into a couple of months of reflective silence rather than coming up with any policies to present to the people of the state, apart from the early slip-ups, at least by Mrs Redmond.

I also congratulate all six honourable members in this chamber who are now in the shadow ministry, although perhaps it should be commiserations to the two who missed out. You would have to feel a bit aggrieved, when 75 per cent of your membership in this council are in the shadow ministry, having missed out. It must feel as if you are being rather overlooked.

I hope they are all going to be able to be accommodated over there. I understand we are looking at getting a two storey front bench, a bit like bunk beds, so they can all fit in there. I am not sure whether the Hon. Mr Ridgway will be upstairs or downstairs. Given that he has the overalls, perhaps he can afford to get a bit messy as he goes up the stairs.

We now see that the Leader of the Opposition in this place, the Hon. Mr Ridgway, who aspires to be the Leader of the Government and could be the third most senior cabinet member in the state, someone who would regularly be acting premier, now has all the credibility of someone in a hotdog costume skulking up and down the Mall handing out free hotdog vouchers.

If this is his or the opposition's substitute for policy for any kind of alternative vision for the future of South Australia, rather than coming up with policies, rather than coming up with a budget and looking at how they are going to pay for all their promises, it is just one thing after another. We have new courts, more pay for teachers, new prisons as well as the new stadium—the Marty Memorial Stadium, of course. We have all those things, but instead of coming up with a plan for how they will pay for all that, instead what have we got? The Hon. Mr Ridgway donning a pair of overalls and lurking around the airport to leap out at the Premier. This is the alternative to policy and to a genuine vision for this state.

Mr Acting President, if you and the other members of the Liberal opposition think that the best thing you can do is run around in costumes rather than developing policy, consulting the people, engaging in parliamentary debate, meeting with people who can put forward their ideas, and bringing it together into a cogent policy and balancing the books, then I am more than happy to take you all down to Trims any old time and buy you all some overalls. You can then spend all your time doing that. Whatever criticism I have of the Hon. Mr Lucas (and they are many), I do not think any of us believe he would be so foolish, so lacking in credibility, as to turn himself into the laughing stock of South Australian politics, as the Hon. Mr Ridgway has chosen to do.

The Hon. Mr Lucas spent some time today talking about the Grand Prix and about the involvement the Premier may have had with it when he was a minister in the Bannon and Arnold governments, yet when I sit in the meetings of the Budget and Finance Committee all we ever get from the Hon. Mr. Lucas is criticism; he knocks all the great events we currently have in this state. We have the Tour Down Under, we have WOMAD, we have the Fringe festival, the Adelaide festival, the Clipsal 500—all those great events—yet all we get from the Hon. Mr Lucas is criticism, and he demands to know how much it all costs and whether payments are being made here and there. It is constant criticism and carping from the Hon. Mr Lucas instead of congratulations for bringing to this state all these great events that make so much of an economic contribution.

If members of the opposition thought that promoting the Hon. Mr Lucas would bring him under control they are sadly mistaken, because he has now decided that he is the shadow treasurer—and he may as well be the shadow leader of the opposition. He is out of control.

Time expired.

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