Page 3029 - Week 08 - Thursday, 7 August 2008
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
tradition, and I compliment you on the review that was done. One of your achievements, which no-one else has done to this time, has been to review the standing orders and get it through this place. My memory—I checked to make sure that I was right, and the vote recorded it—is that these standing orders were unanimously passed by the Assembly. All 17 members agreed to confer on the committee system the power to call for papers. It is called standing order 239, Chief Minister; you might like to read it sometime. I will read it for you, because you obviously do not understand it. The subtitle of 239 is “Power to send for persons, papers and records”. It reads:
A committee shall have power to send for persons, papers, and records.
The public accounts committee has exercised that power. We asked in committee, we wrote nicely, we wrote using standing order 239, and we got excuses that show that the Chief Minister does not understand it. He put his signature on these letters that he wrote back to us, and he does not understand that power. He sees himself as being above the power of the Assembly, he sees himself above the power of the standing orders, and he certainly sees himself above the power of the committees to operate as they must, as they are compelled to do by the Westminster tradition that the Chief Minister is so keen on quoting and that is encapsulated in the standing orders.
There is a principle at stake here—that is, the role and powers of the committees here in the ACT. That is what is at stake here, because if the government today do not agree with this motion, they are repudiating standing order 239, and we might as well take standing order 239 out of the standing orders. On 6 March this year, it was passed on the voices; people did not even call for a vote, because everybody agreed. It was passed by the Assembly by unanimous acclaim. And if you believed it then, you must believe it now, and you must enforce it. Otherwise, you are saying that you do not believe that you are ruled or controlled by the standing orders, and that you are not responsible to this Assembly.
In effect, Chief Minister, the minister for human rights, you are saying that you are above the law. It is that level of arrogance that is truly resounding in the community, because they know you are not above the law and they are waiting to introduce themselves to you personally on 18 October, to remind you of who you are and of who they are. Standing order 239 is at the heart of this. There is the fact that we all voted, we all agreed and we all said, “Yes, we agree to this power being bestowed upon our committees.” And your arrogant refusal to acknowledge that will not help you.
There are many examples where what is purported to be in the functional review is not confirmed by what the government carried out. Recently, at the bushfire inquiry, the former commissioner, Peter Dunn, appeared, and he made a number of comments. He said: “I wrote to the functional review and said you cannot use that data. You cannot use the report on government data to compare the ACT to other jurisdictions because they have different functions. For instance, some have fire and emergency, some have rescue, some have search functions and others do not. Therefore your data is incorrect.” He thought he had agreement. Mr Speaker, I seek leave to table the document that Mr Dunn sent to the committee.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .