Page 6 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 14 February 2012
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can table a printout of the swipe cards which show when we go in and out of this building, or perhaps he could ask InTACT to provide him with a copy of the logins from the computer. As we all know, we all log in and we all log off. That is available. If in fact he has provided all of his services in this building, no problem. I have no difficulty with that. In fact, I applaud it. But I do not think so. My office overlooks the car park and I see who comes and goes. And I can say this, Mr Speaker: the Leader of the Opposition goes frequently but his director of electorate services comes very, very infrequently, and I have a concern about that.
Mr Speaker, if you have contempt for your staff administration in that you do not chase them up for an attendance record, you are going to have contempt for the process in not bothering to authorise off-site employment. We are not talking about the occasional accompanying of a member or in fact the representation of a member at a function or something like that. We are not talking about that. We are talking about somebody who predominantly performs their duties off site, out of the precinct.
If it was a public service office, there is a specific approval process to go through. The enterprise agreement is quite clear about it. There has to be a conversation between the member and corporate services around the arrangements. I would like to know whether that conversation went on, because if that conversation did not occur, the Leader of the Opposition is in breach of section E8.2 of the enterprise agreement. That is where the onus lies. It lies with a member of this place. And this is the Leader of the Opposition.
As the only qualified lawyer in this place, you would think, Mr Speaker, that the Leader of the Opposition would be very picky about the detail, that he would be very concerned about the detail and he would make sure that everything in his office was squeaky clean. I am sorry about this, Mr Speaker, but it would appear, from the freedom of information documents and from observations, that there is something very unclean going on. And we need to get to the bottom of it.
We have asked for an independent audit. We believe in fact that this is a specific issue. There are two very specific points, and we need to have an independent audit of the issues. The Leader of the Opposition needs to come in here by close of business on Thursday and answer those questions. We then need to agree to an independent audit to go right to the root cause of all of this and make sure that not only are the systemic problems fixed but that there has been no inappropriate application of territory funds. I commend the motion to the chamber.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (10.19): Mr Speaker, we have seen the government go from their position on Friday when we had the hysterical claims made by the Chief Minister in relation to all and sundry—allegations that she is unable to back up—to where we have seen them back away today and get the failed former minister John Hargreaves to now lead the charge and bring forward this motion.
On Friday we had Katy Gallagher making all sorts of unsubstantiated allegations. Someone must have spoken to her over the weekend and said: “Actually, you cannot back that up, because it is not true. You can’t actually match your rhetoric with
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