Page 2473 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 17 June 2009
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this and I appreciate he is busy. We are all busy but I really cannot see why he could not have found half an hour if only to come and tell us the reasons he felt there was nothing to say to us.
To not do that is plainly rude to the committee and, by being rude to the committee, he is being rude to the Assembly. Not appearing before the committee is a breach of the standing orders of the Assembly. Standing order 277(m)(i) is about refusing to appear before a committee when ordered to do so, and this is the standing order that the minister did not adhere to.
You have already got my amendment in front of you but I formally foreshadow that I will be moving it.
Mr Barr: Are you going to move it?
MS LE COUTEUR: No, I am only foreshadowing it; I am not moving it. I will move it at the end of my speech.
Mr Coe: The member was in contempt.
MS LE COUTEUR: Yes. We have discussed for a while what the appropriate thing to say to Mr Barr is. I did think about “slap on the wrist”. We looked carefully through the standing orders and we actually could not find “slap on the wrist” in the standing orders.
Mr Barr: Public flogging, no?
MS LE COUTEUR: Okay, it would be good if we could amend standing orders. Maybe “slap on the wrist with a copy of standing orders”. We looked at things and we thought that, as “admonish” is meant to warn or caution, at this stage admonishing was pretty much the official standing order version of a slap on the wrist. So this is what we are trying to say. It is a serious slap on the wrist. We actually think this is a serious problem.
The problem here is the lack of respect for the Assembly and its processes. The reason we do not support the word “censure” is only that “censure” says clearly that the minister has gone against the wishes or directions of the Assembly. In this case I think probably he has not actually gone that far; he is just being completely and utterly uncooperative.
How a parliament or an assembly works on a day-to-day level underpins its effectiveness as an instrument of democracy. If the Assembly cannot work, then we are failing in our duty to the people who elected us and the integrity of the whole government comes into question. The government gets its integrity because of the Assembly. We get our integrity because the people of Canberra voted for us all and, if the Assembly’s processes are called into contempt, then this weakens the Assembly. But even more than that, it weakens the government. It weakens our democracy. But the Assembly is the fountain, as it were, the beginning of democracy.
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