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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Tuesday, 10 February 2004) . . Page.. 10 ..

and I looked at those issues and talked to Mr Hargreaves. We decided, having talked to him, that he should continue sitting on the committee. Those issues do arise from time to time.

Here, an issue has arisen when Mrs Dunne put out this document in good faith and, as soon as it was brought to her attention that there was something remiss, she did the proper thing in relation to her committee and took the appropriate steps. I think that should be the end of the matter.

MS TUCKER (10.57): I was hoping that Mrs Dunne would speak because I am a little unclear about the Liberals’ position on this motion. Mr Smyth has said that he feels that it was not a contempt of the parliament; it was just encouraging people to participate in the committee process. So, on one hand, they seem to be saying that it is not even an issue but, on the other, they are saying there was a lapse of judgment—and clearly there was understood to have been a lapse of judgment by Mrs Dunne because she chose to stand aside, or is that not the case? Is it that she stood aside even though she did not feel that she had interfered with the committee process, but felt she had to stand aside because of the views of the rest of the committee? I do not know quite what her position is.

If there is, in her view, a reason for her to stand aside, which is that she thinks her action was, in fact, inappropriate and could be seen as a contempt, then if she said that in this place perhaps we could save some time and not go through a committee process at this point. The committee, obviously, would always have within its power the capacity to elect another chair or whatever, if it felt strongly about the matter. The whole Assembly could also have that debate, depending on how seriously people regarded the issue, but also on how seriously they regarded the apology or the statement from Mrs Dunne, whatever that might be.

However, I do think that the last sentence, which is, “To help bring Aldi to the Markets, write to The Secretary, Planning and Environment Committee”, and the fact that Mrs Dunne acknowledged that she is the chair, means that she has crossed the line between her role as spokesperson for planning for the Liberal Party and the role of chair of the committee. I think that is an issue of concern. I take Mr Smyth’s point that it is quite difficult sometimes to work out quite what is appropriate and what is not appropriate in the circumstance. It is true, as Mr Stefaniak said, that we had a similar incident with Mr Hargreaves on the fireworks inquiry.

I know that, as chair, I will encourage people to put submissions in to a committee inquiry and, if I see a particular view not being represented in an inquiry, I might say that I am aware that there is this view in the community but we are not really hearing it. I think you could say, therefore, that I was soliciting particular views, and the aim of that would be to bring a complete picture to the work of the committee.

In this situation, however, it is fairly clear that, as chair, Mrs Dunne has put a very clear point of view about what she wants the result of that inquiry to be. Quite often we will have a position on the issue in committee work. We all have our views and we will potentially have party policies on the subject, so there is no way that we can pretend that everyone goes to an inquiry in a neutral state. What we try to do is to set aside our views

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