Page 5998 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 8 December 2010
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Mrs Dunne: Extend the terms of reference.
MR SESELJA: and extend the terms of reference for an inquiry under the Inquiries Act. But something between yesterday and today happened, and we are not quite sure what that was. But we do see this often. The Greens retreat. They retreat from serious scrutiny.
So what they are proposing instead is again about the visuals. It is about pretending to do something when there is not a genuine scrutiny. It sounds familiar, because we had it some months ago with the health minister. The health minister said, “No, there are no problems.” It is the same thing as with this minister. Then the health minister was forced to acknowledge that yes, there were problems and we were going to have an inquiry. Should we have an open inquiry under the Inquiries Act? “No, we do not need to do that; we have got another way of doing the inquiry,” a secret way, a way that covers it up.
That is exactly what we are getting here. It is not as secret but what we are getting is the less effective inquiry, the less transparent inquiry, the inquiry that does not have the same ability to get to the root causes so that we can fix them. That is what we are being asked to support today here by the Greens.
But make no mistake about this. We had acknowledgement of serious issues. I had the CPSU in my office recently. The number one thing they raised with me was the problems at Bimberi. It was the number one thing. And they have issues across the board with the ACT government on a number of fronts but this was the number one thing they raised with me.
So we have these acknowledged serious issues and instead of saying, “Yes, there are serious problems; yes, we want to do a thorough investigation,” what the Greens and the Labor Party are proposing is that we find a less effective way. It is about the charade. It is about saying, “It is off for an inquiry.” You have got to question the motivation.
We heard it again from Ms Hunter when she said, “We will take the word of the minister.” We hear that a lot from the Greens. We hear it on so many things. And ministers generally—and certainly from this government we have seen this—are not that interested in having their departments and their actions put under scrutiny. That is generally the way it goes. They would prefer not to be heavily scrutinised. So we need to take what they say with a grain of salt. We need to pursue these things.
If the new standard, as accepted now apparently by the Greens, that is put forward by the minister, is that you only do inquiries under the Inquiries Act when there is a death, if that is the new standard, then we have set a new low for accountability, that we will only pursue true accountability after someone dies, not before.
We believe the problems are significant enough. This is not something that Mrs Dunne has manufactured. I think it has been accepted by all in this Assembly today that there are serious issues. The question is: are you serious in your response?
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