Page 237 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 December 2008
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MR SESELJA: I withdraw, Madam Assistant Speaker. We always have a bit of a chuckle when we get lectures like that from the Chief Minister. We certainly do chuckle when he preaches to us about honour. There is no doubt about it; it makes us all have a bit of a laugh to ourselves, given his behaviour over a long period of time.
Mr Corbell did take a more reasonable approach than the Chief Minister, and I commend him for that. We do not agree with him on this particular point, but he took the approach, and he did actually touch on a very important point, which is that there are some legitimate claims on both sides in these arguments. We are saying that the legislature should be able to make these decisions, particularly when, as outlined so well by my colleague Mr Smyth in relation to Odgers Australian Senate Practice, this is clearly not about internal deliberations of cabinet. We do not want to know what individual cabinet members thought about the functional review and thought about the response to the functional review. We do not need to know what was said in cabinet. We are not asking for that. But it is reasonable that this kind of advice, that this kind of report, is made available.
The logical conclusion from the Chief Minister’s quite dogmatic position is that governments would never have to release anything, because this practice would lead to them stamping anything that they thought was vaguely sensitive as “cabinet-in-confidence”, and in some way bringing it before cabinet and applying this 10-year rule. That is a totally unreasonable proposition.
Unfortunately, we also have a significant shift and a significant backdown by the Greens. I think that it is important for non-government members to genuinely keep the government accountable. It is important to stick to our positions that we take to the election. I think that is of critical importance. But if you find yourself agreeing with the government often enough, if the government is often happy with your decisions when you are a non-government member, you start to question over a period of time whether you are really keeping them as accountable as you should.
We saw—and Mr Hanson touched on this in his speech—the issue already of the appropriation bill being rammed through, with debate gagged, and that was supported by two parties in this house, the Labor Party and the Greens. When you talk about openness and accountability, at the first opportunity, the debate was gagged. With the second opportunity, involving the Costello report, we saw prior to the election a very clear position from the Greens. In fact, it is fair to say that there was an amount of running on their record. I heard a lot from the Greens about their experience in the Assembly, that they were building on that experience in the Assembly and that they were building on the work that had been done. And much of the record was about keeping the government accountable.
One of the main things that Dr Foskey did to try and keep the government accountable, having considered the position, was to take advice and consider this through the committee process as well as through the Assembly. Having done that, she came to a reasonable conclusion that this type of document should not be protected by cabinet-in-confidence. We should not simply be able to stamp whatever we like as cabinet-in-confidence and therefore prevent its release. She came to this conclusion. The Greens did run on that. They ran on accountability; they ran on their record in the Assembly.
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