Page 2307 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 16 June 2009
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I pay credit to those public servants who came back to us on a number of occasions with inadvertent misleads or inadvertent incorrect information and corrected it at the first possible opportunity. There is nothing more we can ask from them when that occurs. We do have serious concerns, though, that it did happen a fair bit and that, in fact, in some cases it was not corrected.
This would be bad enough on its own were it not compounded by the Chief Minister’s technique of misrepresenting proceedings in the committee to external parties and then presenting the responses to those misrepresentations back to the committee as some form of evidence of the correctness of his own position. The committee was not taken in by this technique, and I will quote from the report:
The Committee also notes that the Chief Minister misrepresented the Committee during hearings, claiming ‘defamatory allegations’ had been made … The Committee recommends that the Chief Minister write again to the builders involved in the OwnPlace scheme … and that the Chief Minister correct the record.
This is the tactic of the Chief Minister and he has been called to account on it by this committee. He misrepresented what was said and then he sought to use the response to those misrepresentations to his advantage. The committee has very clearly sent a message that this is unacceptable:
The Committee also notes that the Chief Minster misrepresented the Committee during hearings, claiming ‘defamatory allegations’ had been made … The Committee recommends that the Chief Minister write again to the builders involved in the OwnPlace scheme … and that the Chief Minister correct the record.
In addition, the committee resolved, as a result of Mr Stanhope’s misrepresentation of committee proceedings, that the chair write to the companies and industry associations to correct the record. It is unfortunate that we were placed in the position where we had to do that. But the committee agreed, because of the misrepresentation, it was right that we write to those individuals.
In relation to the call-in exercise by Mr Barr on the Canberra hospital car park development, the committee went on:
The Committee considers that withholding—
Ms Burch: The majority of the committee.
MR SESELJA: Ms Burch has dissenting comments and I acknowledge that she did not agree with every decision of the committee. There is no doubt about that and that is reflected in her dissenting comments. In contempt of process, here is the quote:
The Committee considers that withholding of this information by omission may be seen to be an act of avoidance of scrutiny.
The pattern, again! It goes on:
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