Page 5416 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 November 2011
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about funding of the RSPCA. We started question time with Mr Corbell getting up and clearly apologising to the Assembly, saying that a mistake had been made, that he had been given the wrong information by his department and that yes, he had gone out and had made those public statements in different forums, one of them being an annual reports hearing as well as the Canberra Times and so on.
If we go to the ministerial code of conduct, it states quite clearly that being answerable to the Assembly requires ministers to ensure that they do not wilfully mislead the Assembly in respect of their ministerial responsibilities. The ultimate sanction for a minister who misleads is to resign or be dismissed. It goes on to say:
Ministers should take reasonable steps to ensure the factual content of statements they make in the Assembly are soundly based and that they correct any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity.
We have heard that Mr Corbell became aware of this matter yesterday. He went to his department, to his officials, and asked them to look at this matter. It was discovered that he had been given the wrong information, that he had been incorrectly briefed. He took the earliest opportunity to come into this Assembly and correct the record, and that was today. So he followed what is set out here under “Conformity with the Principles of Accountability and Financial and Collective Responsibility”. He has apologised for the confusion caused.
At the beginning of this debate I had my office contact Mr Linke, who is the Chief Executive Officer of the RSPCA. Mr Linke, of course, has been concerned about this matter. What he would like to see is a media release, a clear statement sent out publicly that this has been a mistake, and a letter to the Canberra Times to correct that mistake so that the public can be informed of the correct information—now that the minister has the correct information that we ensure the public have the correct information.
Minister Corbell was advised consistently by his officials. That advice was wrong on this matter. They gave him the incorrect advice. Once he became aware of that, he corrected the record. That is why we will not be supporting the censure motion today. As I said, we would like to see it put out there very clearly and very publicly that this was a mistake, that the wrong information did go out, because I think it is important that the public have the correct information on this matter. But the fact that the minister has come in, corrected the record and laid out the sequence of events quite clearly for us here does not, for us, warrant a censure on the minister today.
MR HANSON (Molonglo) (3.53): First I would like to commend Mr Coe for bringing this motion before the Assembly today. But I would more particularly like to commend Mr Coe for his investigative work and the hard questions that he has been asking in his pursuit of this issue. Let us not pretend for an instant that if Mr Coe had not been badgering the minister and digging up the truth, asking the hard questions—if you think that Mr Corbell would have come in here and apologised as he has and said “I got it wrong”—we would have seen a correction of the record; of course we would not have.
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