Page 380 - Week 01 - Thursday, 11 December 2008
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he was forced to change his evidence before the estimates committee. I think that the treatment meted out to that official was shameful. I have said it; I said it in the estimates process, and I will say it here again. The treatment of officials who did not give the right answers according to the wont of the Chief Minister was disgraceful. In my experience of 17 years as a federal public servant, five years as an adviser in this place and seven years as a member of this place, I have never seen a public official so shabbily treated as I saw that day. Every member of this Assembly and every member who was associated with this needs to apologise to him and to his organisation for the way he was treated that day. It was shameful.
The Chief Minister sat there and let it happen, and he had to be recalled. I think that it was an absolutely disgraceful episode. It was one of a number of disgraceful episodes which culminate in this today. We have got criticism after criticism in the report:
Government agencies relied primarily on ActewAGL, which acted on behalf of the consortium, for any pre-Development Application consultation, and this did not properly occur …
Government agencies did not always exercise care to ensure arm’s length dealings with ActewAGL, and its consultants.
You can open this report at almost any page, Madam Deputy Speaker, and you see a criticism of the process—a process that this Chief Minister, the planning minister, the Deputy Chief Minister and the Attorney-General have all supported time and time again. They all stood shoulder to shoulder and said: “It’s a great process. How dare anyone”—how dare the members of the community, how dare the members of the opposition, how dare the Green member who was here in this place—“criticise this process, question the process, raise concerns that the community raised? How dare they do that.”
This was inappropriate political interference in an arm’s-length process. The Auditor-General tells us that the people who had their arms in this up to the elbows were the government. The government time and time again have been criticised for not being at arm’s length. Of course, today we have heard from the Chief Minister. I heard reference to him on the radio, I think on the 7 o’clock news, and the Chief Minister said he accepted all the recommendations of the Auditor-General’s report. I thought, “Gee, at last, he’s admitted that he made a mistake.” But by quarter to nine or thereabouts, when he was being interviewed on Radio Triple 6, he had already resiled from that, and he was saying, “Look, I agree with everything, but the Auditor-General is wrong headed, in the same way as I accept that we did something wrong, but the Auditor-General is much more wrong than I am.”
There is a pattern of behaviour here. It is the same as I pointed out in question time today. It is the same as when the Chief Minister criticised the Coroner. In the same way, before the Chief Minister actually saw the recommendations of the McLeod inquiry, he said, “I accept all the recommendations in the McLeod inquiry,” and here we are, nearly six years after the fires, and most of those recommendations have either been ignored or repudiated.
Mr Seselja: Won’t he accept the responsibility for the—
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