Page 771 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 13 April 1994
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I can just see the Tasmanian Government, who not only have problems with the Independents and the Labor members; they have problems with their own peculiar conservatives in their upper house. I can just see the landslide of support that this Bill will achieve from Liberal Party divisions in government. It just goes to show that the attitude that people take when they are in opposition is often different from the attitude that they take when they are in government.
The potential for damage that this Bill will produce, I think, will become apparent to the Assembly in due course, and I suspect that at a future time it may well be revisited. As I say, we oppose it in principle for the reasons that we have stated. I probably need to go into them again because I do want to alert members. I can sniff the political wind, particularly at the moment, and it is clear that this Bill will get support in principle; but I would urge that members take a deep breath, go away and have a good think about it, and that we come back and look at the detail stage of it again.
I will be writing to all members setting out some major problems for the detail stage. I am not in a position to propose amendments yet. You need to think up the policies before amendments occur. When Mr Moore proposed this Bill he was targeting it at what are generally called in shorthand statutory appointments, the boards. He was saying that he did not like the sort of people that we had appointed to some boards. There were people present in the house who were appointed by the Liberals to a board, people who had spouses appointed to boards. That is the sort of thing, no doubt, that Mr Moore is targeting. You probably would say that you do not like some members of the trade union movement that we have appointed.
Everybody knows what Mr Moore had in mind. I recall him being on the Matthew Abraham show. We said that there is a danger in this because Canberra is a small community. Most of the boards that we appoint people to are unpaid. Many members of this Assembly have served on those sorts of unpaid boards in the past. Even if you are associated with a political party, if you are serving on a board it is a lot of time out of your day. It is a major contribution to make. You probably do not want to have to go through a process. If there is a particularly hot political debate in the Assembly because of some issue or another and the Opposition of the day thinks that it has just been done over by the Government of the day on a particular issue, the Opposition of the day would go for somebody who seemed to be a friend of the Government, drag them through the Assembly committee process and ask them all sorts of questions.
We have seen this to the ultimate stage in the United States where the current popular thing is to quiz people as to whether their domestic assistants, their maids - in a more egalitarian society we might say the person who comes and does the cleaning every fortnight - have a green card, and what their taxation or naturalisation status is. There are absurd situations. We do not want that sort of game to be played here. If the precedent is that that game is played here, again, as I have said publicly, we in the Labor Party are a pretty tough bunch. Mr Berry demonstrated that today. We can play that game just as hard as you people, if not harder, and it would get very nasty and people would not want to accept statutory appointments. That is our objection in principle.
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