Page 4362 - Week 10 - Thursday, 22 September 2011
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If you are mixing up your committees and you are not getting your tense right, it is no wonder you would be offended. You need to read the letter properly. You need to take the quotes properly. It is interesting, Mr Speaker, that I followed the process to the letter of the standing orders and the companion. I had concerns, I did the right thing and I resigned over those concerns. I wrote to you. You wrote to the committee. The committee wrote back to you. You granted precedence and offered me the opportunity to move the motion, which I did. What did the motion say? It said:
… pursuant to standing order 276, a Select Committee on Privilege be established to examine whether there was improper interference …
Improper interference, improper behaviour, improper conduct—I think they are all quite interchangeable. I will not read my speech again, although it is tempting to read it all again. It is important that people know what we are looking at.
There is no substance to this motion, Mr Speaker. I will not be bullied. There is enough bullying going on through the ACT public service where ministers do not stand up for their public servants and they cover up and hide. I will not be bullied. We are bullying now everything from obstetrics wards and the ambulance service to the CIT—so many different places. So many different concerns are being raised and we are wasting our time on a motion when the minister did not deliver a single fact.
Ms Hunter was the same. She did not quote an entire phrase, sentence or paragraph from the press release. It is interesting that Ms Hunter actually seemed better prepared than I did. She had a typed speech, it appeared, to get stuck into this little beauty. The first I heard of this, Mr Speaker, was when this turned up on my bench here at about a minute past 2 o’clock. Obviously others had far more notice of this than I did. It says: “Censure motion: that the Assembly censures Mr Smyth for his misleading comments in his media release ‘Gallagher to be examined’”—“to be examined”, future tense, to be examined in the future, “and subsequent public comments”. No-one has yet quoted a single one of the public comments. The mover of the motion could not quote a single line from the press release to support his case because there is none. They will get up and assert it now that the folly of this has been pointed out, but these are serious matters.
When I moved the motion to establish the privileges committee on Tuesday it was without any lobbying and it was without any negotiations, because that is the process we follow in these committees. The Speaker makes a decision and the Speaker informs the member. In this case you did inform me, and I am grateful for that. You then informed the Assembly and you made the offer to me. If people do not like that process then perhaps we need to look at the process, but that is how it worked and that is what was followed.
The Assembly decided that there would be an examination. Indeed, what are the things that they are looking at? They are improper interference, the announcement by the Chief Minister and approaches made by the chair. That is it; it is all there. That is what is in the press release. That is what I have stated consistently. I have followed the process outlined by the chapter concerning privilege. I have adhered to what the
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