The Canberra Times has a story on the near-run thing that was yesterdays ACT ALP Conference. The Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope, managed to defeat efforts to delay school closures by a margin of just four votes, 96-100.
John Hargreaves was not impressed with the “temerity” of those who opposed his view, particularly Karin Macdonald:
To find that one of our elected representatives has the temerity to stand up here and criticise the minister in such a personal attack is something that I have never experienced in all my time with the Labor Party in the ACT
In a worrying sign for Karin Macdonald, her right-unity faction voted against her stand.
Apparently five Labor MLA’s voted to stay the school closure program. I’ve got Katy Gallagher, Simon Corbell, Wayne Berry, and Karin Macdonald. I’d love to know who number five was.
Well it can only be Mick Gentleman of MAry Porter can’t it? Hargreaves came out in support of Jon, and Barr can’t oppose his own plan…
Voted for by the people, ignoring the people.
Gotta love politics.
Perhaps there should be a referendum on the school closures then….it won’t happen though.
It isn’t Barr’s plan – it’s his departments plan and the plan of a narrow majority of his party. Majority wins. Now, there’s two things he can do:
1) Resign. Which is very big and brave of him, but does bugger all.
2) Stay and implement the policy in an effective manner.
Welcome to democracy – if a majority disagrees with you, you don’t have the right to overrule them.
Of course, it’s quite possible that Barr didn’t vote to stay his government’s policy, and JB’s just got his numbers wrong. I’m not sure myself – where did you get ‘em from, JB?
From the article.
But we should note that the Department hasn’t shown any signs of having developed this policy, the Liberal’s FOI work has yet to find any skerrig of the 2020 policy prior to Andrew taking up his office.
The secret “functional review” is supposedly where the policy work was done.
Oops, Simto can’t read, and somehow managed to read Wayne Berry as Andrew Barr. Um, they’ve both got the letter A and W in their first name, and the letter B in their last names. Mea culpa, maxima stupida.
Simto if we had better public schools maybe we could all read gooderer.
Mick Gentleman is in the left faction so i imagine he voted with WB, KG, SC, KM et al.
It was Mick Gentleman. Worrying for him (and Porter) that they barely rated a mention at conference.
The real performance of the day though was Minister Hargreaves prior to and after lunch…his references to drinkdriving and drunkenness were bizarre (he implied, barely coherently, that his opponents were drunk…)
Roland,
Corbell’s actions re voting along factional lines must give your boss some serious ammunition.
The government have conceded that they are, in principle, against the school closures, and yet they are to close.
That provides some serious moral and ethical ammunition.