Page 1688 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 21 August 2007
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Dr Foskey, Mr Gentleman, Ms Porter, Mrs Burke and I cannot sit on this privileges committee. A privileges committee comprises members of the Assembly who are not members of the executive. The Speaker does not sit on these committees. So there you go; it is a process of elimination. One government member and four members of my party are available. That is the normal situation; hence this motion.
Mr Corbell: Ted Quinlan sat on a privileges committee which looked into me.
MR STEFANIAK: He might have. We have taken advice on this. You might want to bastardise it, attorney, but this would be the appropriate composition just in terms of how this place works. So that is the basis for the composition.
It is interesting that the Speaker has got involved in this matter. He has outlined exactly what his role in the proceedings were, from the time Mr Pratt wrote to him on 29 June to the time the committee did. He has given this matter precedence over anything else, which should indicate the seriousness of the matter. Is the government going to go against, effectively, its own Speaker in relation to this matter? This is a serious matter.
The relevant parts of the transcript of 26 June are from about page 680 to page 704. Had I, as a minister in the previous government, not answered questions and behaved like Mr Hargreaves did, I would not have been a minister. We were a minority government and I would have been out on my ear. I might have been out on my ear, anyway, because the Chief Minister might not have been particularly impressed with such behaviour. The whole idea of an estimates committee is to go through the budget and to get answers. We did not get any answers that afternoon. In all my time in the Assembly, I have never seen such antics by a minister. Just because you are in a majority government it does not mean you can behave with that sort of arrogance and show such contempt for the committee process.
This place, since its inception, has prided itself on having a good committee process in which members work together. This estimates committee was no different. Although we had our differences of opinion, it was done in a very civilised way and we have come up with a majority report containing a number of recommendations. There are dissenting comments from both sides; that is normal. But the work of the Assembly and that committee was impeded. All you have to do is read through that transcript to see how few questions the minister answered. I do not know why he behaved in that way. Maybe that is a matter for him to talk to a privileges committee about. From where I sat, I saw public servants squirming in their seats, clearly embarrassed by the antics that were going on—the lack of answers and the baiting of Mr Pratt.
As Mr Pratt said, we have a bit of banter across the chamber; a bit of baiting is part of the game. But on this occasion it went a couple of steps further, it got quite vicious and quite repetitious. It did start to interfere quite significantly with the work of the estimates committee because we were not getting the answers that we wanted.
Mr Hargreaves: That is correct.
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