Page 3323 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 17 August 2011
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which the proposed appointment was announced, it would appear that a letter from the Chief Minister was hand-delivered to the office of the chair of the public accounts committee, rather than being given to the Committee Office. This hand-delivery was done apparently just before the Chief Minister’s media release was disseminated to the local media.
That in itself is, in my understanding, a major break with process. Statutory appointments are normally dealt with confidentially. In effect, what the government did was to out the candidate. The committee wrote and said that we had some concerns about this. Indeed, in one of the letters the committee said, in the lovely polished tones that committees do in their writing:
Furthermore, the Committee notes there is also a discourtesy to the proposed nominee, as it is yet to consider and provide its views in accordance with the Auditor-General Act 1996.
The problem becomes this: if we are going to put the names of statutory appointments out into the public realm before they are agreed to, what if that person does not get the position? Particularly in the case of the Auditor-General, the public accounts committee has a veto. So by outing any preferred nominee you put them at grave risk and you put the process at grave risk. It does then put undue pressure on the committee to comply with the wishes of the government. As was actually recorded, statements were made that the PAC is not a rubber stamp for the government. So it is a major break with tradition. I have asked some of the old hands here, and nobody else can think of a case where the name of the nominee has been put out in this way.
As a consequence of that, there were further developments. They included the nominee actually doing interviews. It is probably not unreasonable that, if your name is out in the public, somebody will ring you. So there was an amount of undue pressure, and that could all have been avoided if this had been done in the normal way.
Unfortunately, on the night on which the name of the preferred nominee had become public, the individual concerned actually approached the chair of the public accounts committee at a function. The chair was most concerned at this approach and immediately informed all committee members by email of the conversation. Indeed, shortly afterwards, I am told, the Chief Minister herself approached the chair of the public accounts committee to discuss the progress of the consideration of the nomination, which again was unfortunate. Subsequently the Chair of the PAC also told the committee that the preferred candidate had approached the Auditor-General’s office. And this is what comes about when you put the name of the candidate out in the public, against the strong tradition of this place.
I believe the committee was extremely concerned about the process which had been followed to this point. And in view of those concerns, the committee took a combination of an unprecedented three actions. Firstly, it got legal advice through the Clerk to confirm what our powers were. Secondly, we had to then request an extension of the time frame within which to consider the nomination. Thirdly, we actually sought information from and ultimately had a private briefing from the Chief Minister and the head of the ACT public service.
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