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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 1 Hansard (20 February) . . Page.. 253 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

undertaken by this Government over the last 12 months. In fact, at the moment the Government has around 200 separate consultation processes going on. In addition, there are about 120 boards and advisory councils which consult regularly on a wide range of different issues. Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, as you would be aware and as the Greens have already indicated, we also have a new section in the Chief Minister's Department, headed up by Tina van Raay, which will address one of the areas we understand we had a problem in. That was linking the consultation process with the feedback to the community. I fully agree that that was not handled as well as it could have been. The fact is that we have - not because of this motion, not because of the groups involved who came to see me, but before that process - closed that gap with three full-time employees in the Chief Minister's Department.

MR MOORE (4.24): Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, the premise Mrs Carnell has taken to abuse parliamentary privilege today is that there is no proof in the statements Jacqui Rees has made. Then she goes on and lambasts the woman time after time without providing any proof herself. It is the pot calling the kettle black and it is a misuse of parliamentary privilege in order to do it. She claims that there is some kind of proof by referring to a series of newspaper articles. Those newspaper articles were attached to a letter she wrote to Ms Rees; I do not think it has a date on it. It referred to Mrs Carnell's letter of 29 January to the Conservation Council, and stated:

On the first issue I attach for your perusal some examples of sourced quotes from the written media.

Mrs Carnell has used some of those. Mrs Carnell used some quotes today and said, "Jacqui Rees just picks on public servants, and they have no chance at all to defend themselves, they have no chance at all in the public arena". Nonsense! Each one of these quotes, when Ms Rees has talked about a public servant, has been in response to something the public servant has said in public. I have been right through each one of them. Mr Prattley, you may remember, did a quite large article where he was singing the praises of Barcelona and using it as a model for Canberra. Of course he deserves criticism if he is going to do something as ridiculous as that. He has put his head out; he has made the public statement. Should everybody say, "He is a public servant, so we cannot say anything."? Of course not.

We have to ask ourselves: What is it that has made this Chief Minister so vindictive that when she reads these articles she can see only a certain side of them, she can see only that sense of them? One quote says:

Chief planner Gary Prattley, executive director ... under the new arrangements, said the idea of a statutory body "reeked of the 1960s", Ms Rees said. "His proposals reek of the 1880s ...

She is responding to Gary Prattley saying about her that the idea of a statutory body reeks of the 1960s. She responds, reasonably, that his proposal reeks of the 1880s, when there was a system conducive to corruption. Every royal commission in Australia that has looked into these sorts of areas has always come up with the view that we should take great care not to set up systems that are conducive to corruption. That does not say that these people are corrupt.

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