Coalition Meeting with Bill Bennett – Father Jim Roberts

Father Jim Roberts [00:00:00] There is big Art, and there’s Renate in her trench coat, and there’s me in my black suit with a collar. A study in the tripartite leadership. So we’re all going to get ushered into Bennett’s office, and he offers us coffee. We sit, the three of us, like birds on the fence on this couch, and there’s Norman Spector. A marvellous name, Spector. On the left hand side, facing us in this chair. And then there’s Premier Bennett in his bigger chair on the right hand side. So off we go.

 [00:00:36] And Bennett, to his credit, tried to get off to a reasonably good friendly rapport here. And he made some benign remark, about how it’s not that good a day out. That it was drizzling. And Renate, out of sheer nervousness, I’m sure. She just shut out. She said, “That’s totally irrelevant to the topic of our conversation”. And she just cut him off in slight, and so the meeting went down. I, I knew I couldn’t try again, otherwise I’d look like a fool to interject something else. So, we just had to soldier through. I tried to make the point with the Premier that he talked in terms of downsizing government. It sounded quite good, let’s get rid of big government. But as I said Mr. Premier, what you have done is you have concentrated and centralized in your office here in Victoria so many of the more democratic, localized, municipal et cetera board powers that existed throughout the province. So you’ve not downsized government, you’ve only downsized the bodies. You’ve upsized. You’ve increased government, you’ve lessened democracy in our province.

 [00:01:55] He appeared truly, in my opinion, in my view of him, not to have an idea of what I was talking about. Spector, Norman Spector, on the other hand, a very bright –  not that the point needed brightness, it was very simple point. He understood me. I could see from the eye contact and a bit of a smile on his face. You know, he knew where I was aiming, but it just fell, it fell like a lead balloon. Nothing further to be said. Obviously, since the big man didn’t pick it up, Spector didn’t, he wasn’t going to, to ride with points made by the opposition. So that’s the way the meeting went, it was a great big nothing.