Page 800 - Week 02 - Thursday, 12 February 2009
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the outcome, be it the government, the opposition or the crossbench, be responsible for the determinations of privilege or, indeed, as this amendment provides for, be given access to the document before such a claim can be objectively assessed.
As a society we entrust independent arbiters to assess the validity of the competing claims according to an established body of law, and there is a body of international, as well as Australian jurisprudence, that clearly establishes the role of courts and tribunals in assessing these types of claims. The person appointed as legal arbiter will be suitably well qualified to properly resolve disputes and provide defensible and impartial reasons for their decision. The Greens believe that this is the most appropriate way to resolve these disputes. It is not appropriate that these documents be viewed if they should legitimately be protected by privilege. If there is no valid claim of privilege members and the public will be able to view the documents. If there is a valid claim then it is appropriate that members do not see the documents.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (4.32): Madam Assistant Speaker, I do not know if there are still more members to speak, but there are a few questions I think we need to pose to either the Greens members or the Labor members as to how we got into such a shambolic state this morning. We need to go back through it, but I will go to that in a moment.
We fundamentally believe that the outsourcing of parliament’s role of scrutiny is not the right way to go. We believe that, for instance, where there are 10 duly elected members of the Assembly who believe the functional review should be made public, that is reasonable. We have a government that has seven members, and they have significant control over whether a document can be viewed and whether it can be released at any time. Ten elected members of this legislature should not be outsourcing this role. That is our point of principle. We do no believe that this is the correct way to go.
As Mrs Dunne has outlined, there are 11 votes for this standing order to be introduced. We do not agree with the principle behind that. What Mrs Dunne is seeking to do with her amendment, which unfortunately will not be supported, is to actually make it work better and make it work in the way we were told it was going to work when it was initially brought forward. That brings us back to how we got to this position.
It must be said that this is an ever-evolving Greens-Labor agreement. We have seen that in recent days in the area of mental health. Where the agreement was that 30 per cent of funding would go to the community, I think that is now 30 per cent of new funding to go to the community sector, perhaps. I think the targets are now aspirational targets. I think we saw Ms Gallagher saying yesterday that she did not really mean it when she was talking about those targets.
Mrs Dunne: She had her fingers crossed.
MR SESELJA: She did have her fingers crossed. This is going to be the fundamental tension. It is certainly difficult for us who are close to it in the opposition, but I think it is much more difficult for people in the community to understand the exact nature of this agreement, given how quickly it seems to be changing. We can be certain of a few things as it moves forward. Given some of the policy commitments that have
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