Page 3789 - Week 10 - Thursday, 27 August 2009
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Recommendation 2
The Committee recommends that the Administration and Procedure Committee investigated the need for, and if necessary, the level of assistance to be provided to Members in cases of legal proceedings.
I think it is appropriate that that be looked at. I hope somebody takes the opportunity to move that in Assembly business at some time in the near future. It has been around for a long time and all this sad and sorry affair of privilege does is show that it still is there.
The problem for this committee, I think the problem for this Assembly, is this was all done behind closed doors. We did find that the letter was ill advised; we did not find that it was inappropriate. I think it does leave a cloud and I think that is unfortunate for all involved.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Water, Minister for Energy and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (10.35): I would like to thank Ms Hunter as committee chair for the manner in which she conducted this inquiry and Mr Smyth for his contribution to it. I think that the key issue here is the terms of reference of the inquiry, and they are quite clear. The terms of reference referred to this inquiry were to consider whether or not a breach of privilege or contempt had been committed by Mr Cormack in relation to the letter he sent to Mr Hanson or whether the letter was an appropriate response in the circumstances of Mr Hanson’s media release. The approach that I got from this inquiry and the approach, I think, that the chair got from this inquiry, too, was that that is what the inquiry was about.
This was not an inquiry into the conduct of the FOI matter that Mr Hanson was complaining about; it was not an inquiry into the issues surrounding the decision-making around the location of the bush healing farm. That was not what this inquiry was about. What was clear from day one was that Mr Smyth and Mr Hanson sought to use this privileges inquiry to make a broader investigation into all of those matters. If the Liberal Party want to pursue those matters, they can seek an inquiry in this place through one of the standing committees of this place. But what was clear was that there was a political motivation in this inquiry to go beyond the issues around contempt and privilege and to make it a broader inquiry into a whole range of other matters.
What we saw were submissions made by Mr Hanson that sought to bring all and sundry into this inquiry—other public servants, lessees in rural areas, as many people as possible. But none of that was relevant to the terms of reference of the committee. The committee decided that that approach, if agreed to, would be flawed and, therefore, we would contain ourselves to the matters the Assembly had asked the committee to inquire into—that is, whether or not there had been a contempt, whether or not there had been a breach of privilege and whether the sending of a letter was appropriate in the circumstances. Those were the terms of reference, and that is what the committee confined itself to.
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