Page 5366 - Week 14 - Thursday, 19 November 2009
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that he could not back up. The logic of all of these findings was so compelling that every member of this committee, every member from every party, has condemned the Attorney-General. We see now perhaps why the minister was so desperate for this debate not to come on today, why he called that vote, which he knew he was going to lose, in a desperate attempt to try and avoid this debate happening.
It is embarrassing for him, but it opens up a serious rift where one of two things is happening here, and perhaps both. One, there is not compelling logic in the defence that the Attorney-General put up. In fact, finding No 22 says he was not being up-front, he was not being open and honest. The other one that has come to light in this extraordinary attack is that there is a serious division now opening up where the Attorney-General is attacking his own Labor Party colleagues, claiming that you, Madam Deputy Speaker, have engaged in a sham process. We can only try and guess why the Attorney-General believes that you would have engaged in a sham process, but it is a serious charge against one’s own colleague.
I do not believe this has been a sham process. This has been a rigorous process conducted by a tripartisan committee. In any way you try and claim there is a political conspiracy here, it fails at the first hurdle, because the report is unanimous. It fails the test. The Attorney-General, instead of attacking his colleagues and instead of attacking the three members of this committee, needs to say why they are wrong, and he has not been able to do it. His case is severely undermined by the fact that all parties in this place have condemned his performance as minister for corrections and the Attorney-General. This is a serious finding, and I thank the committee for their work in delivering it.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (5.21): Madam Deputy Speaker, during Mr Corbell’s tirade, he attacked the committee for having the temerity to have findings—particularly, he said, findings without a shred of evidence. I was shocked that a committee would put forward findings without a shred of evidence, so I simply went past that page with findings and recommendations and went to the body of the text. It was interesting. Finding 1 says:
Despite specific requests made in writing and repeated in hearings, copies of all relevant Ministerial Briefings were not provided to the Committee.
That seems a fairly reasonable finding. You yourself, Madam Deputy Speaker, having been there, would know what occurred. But if the minster has not read page 2 and 3—and it does not take much to get to page 2 and 3; they are the bits at the start of the document—we could go to paragraph 1.8:
The Committee also learned that Mr Jeremy Hanson MLA had received extensive documentation as a result of the release of information under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. Those documents were also provided to the Committee. While these documents largely represented a subset of the documents already received by the Committee, Mr Hanson’s FOI request also included documents that had not been included in the documents provided to the Committee following its letter of 22 January 2009, referred to above.
So the government, when asked for documents, were selective. They chose not to give the full picture straight up to the committee. Indeed, the committee were aware of this only because Mr Hanson had more documents.
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