Page 4128 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 13 December 2006
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Dr Grimes has been approached by the commonwealth to take up the position of deputy secretary to the commonwealth department of finance, the third most senior position in a financial or economic sense that is available to any treasury official anywhere in Australia. It is a credit and a testament to Dr Grimes’s capacity, reputation and professionalism that the commonwealth sought to approach him to ask him to take up the third most senior economic position in the commonwealth.
In light of that—and I hate to introduce a rather sour note—it disappoints me enormously that Mr Mulcahy, the shadow treasurer in this place, took the opportunity of this significant appointment, a significant testament to Dr Grimes’s capacity, worth and professionalism, to seek to make political capital out of the fact that the commonwealth wished to appoint an ACT public servant to a most senior position, somehow suggesting that Dr Grimes was running away from something, that he did not achieve the job on merit and that it is not a promotion to which he should have aspired.
Mr Mulcahy is making some tawdry political capital by seeking to besmirch or question the basis on which Dr Grimes chose to leave his position as Under Treasurer to the ACT Treasury and to take up a position as deputy secretary—a more senior position than the position he occupied, a real promotion, and something perhaps to which Dr Grimes had aspired all his life. However, it seems as though nothing is too low for Mr Mulcahy. He used every opportunity available to him to sully and sour this most significant day—the appointment to a new position of a fine, outstanding career public servant. Mr Mulcahy is seeking to make some tawdry political capital out of Dr Grimes’s significant achievement.
Mr Mulcahy, in his press release, asked the rhetorical question, “What is it that caused Dr Grimes to leave his position and to seek to move on?” We are all asking that same question in relation to Mr Mulcahy’s departure from his position with the Australian Hotels Association. We believe that the answer to Mr Mulcahy’s departure from his position with the Australian Hotels Association might be revealed in a secret report that he has sought to cover up. It is a pity Mr Mulcahy felt the need to besmirch a public servant in this way.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
The Assembly adjourned at 6.26 pm.
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