Page 1068 - Week 03 - Thursday, 26 February 2009
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matter is not free from doubt and the government proposes these amendments to ensure that the proper operation of these review bodies continues.
I cannot finalise my contribution to the debate in the in-principle stage without dwelling to some extent on Mrs Dunne’s view that this legislation should be sliced and diced so as to remove the provisions concerned with the validation of the appointments I made last year and pass them in a separate stand-alone bill. Mrs Dunne has professed to be concerned with transparency. She has told us that it is only by separately passing these amendments that one can be transparent. We have heard the motherhood statements from Mrs Dunne designed to conceal what I believe are cynical motives. We see them uttered with that look of pained sincerity and mock indignation that she does so well.
The accusation is casually flung across the chamber that the government and I have engaged in a cover-up. That is the accusation—that I have engaged in some sort of cover-up, that these were appointments made in the dead of the pre-election night and that, now having been exposed, I have somehow sought to cover my mistake by burying these amendments in a JACS bill. This is a baseless and cheap accusation which is belied by some very simple facts.
When I made these appointments, I wrote immediately to the relevant committee explaining that I had done so and why I had done so and why I believed it was necessary to do so without waiting for a reply from the committee. Is that the act of a minister seeking to cover up his actions? Is that the act of a minister seeking to make an appointment in the middle of the night hoping that no-one will pay attention to it? I wrote to the committee and I told the committee what I had done, why I had done it and why I believed I needed to do it. That is what I did.
What an absurd, baseless and false suggestion from those opposite that I sought to cover it up! The letter was sent to the relevant standing committee explaining why I had done it. I had sent it on my own volition, having immediately made the appointments. That is not the act of a minister seeking to hide his actions. Indeed, it is the act of a minister who is conscious of the issues at play and wanting to draw them to the attention of the committee in the spirit of being open and transparent about the actions I had taken.
Mrs Dunne is not concerned with transparency; Mrs Dunne is only concerned with one thing, and that is scoring political points in any way she can, even if that involves wasting the time of members here and wasting the time of hard working drafters in the parliamentary counsel’s office—I am sure she got them to draft something—by attempting to split routine legislation such as this in a very poor and tawdry attempt to score political points.
In my view, members of this place should not commission or foreshadow the commissioning of drafting of legislation for cynical and utterly pointless purposes such as this. It is time wasting and it is pointless to suggest the course of action that Mrs Dunne believes should be undertaken. Whilst I have no doubt it is the right of members to do so, I also have no doubt that Mrs Dunne will continue to act in this fashion. She has form in that regard. But the point must be made that when the
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