Page 3155 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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commented on radio that if the government does not recognise there is something wrong, how can they ever correct it? I ask the same question of the Greens: if you do not understand and recognise something is wrong, how will we ever correct it?
We have a Chief Minister who thinks there is nothing wrong and a Greens party that supports that point of view. Ironically, only last week the Speaker circulated a code of conduct for MLAs. It will be interesting to note, Mr Speaker, just how many parts of this code of conduct will be violated at the very outset by you and your colleagues if you fail to keep this Chief Minister accountable. By any measure, the Chief Minister has failed a test and should be censured.
MR COE (Ginninderra) (12.34): This motion of no confidence in the Chief Minister brought to us by Mr Seselja is something we do not do out of any desire for politics, for gain, but simply because we believe that the people of Canberra deserve better. We do not do so lightly, nor do we get any satisfaction from this process. In fact, it is of extreme disappointment to us that the government, the Assembly and all Canberrans have been so severely let down through a lack of honesty. This is a real issue, with real victims; yet we have a Chief Minister in arrogant denial.
The community we represent deserve to know that we as the opposition take our role in this place seriously and will, therefore, question the capability of the Chief Minister after such serious failings. As my colleagues have said, under this government’s guidance, we have a health system that has gone from one of the best performing in the country to one of the worst. The Chief Minister, who presides over this failing health system, must be held to account. We have had 11,700 health records falsified by a person well known to the Chief Minister, a fact that the Chief Minister has failed to disclose. These facts alone warrant this no-confidence motion before us today.
The Chief Minister had plenty of time to disclose the personal nature of her relationship with the person at the centre of the data tampering. After the facts became known that hospital records were doctored to make the government look better—in fact, to make the minister look better—Ms Gallagher chose not to reveal the conflict of interest. Why? What advice was given to the Chief Minister that could possibly make it seem to her that it was acceptable to not disclose the nature of her relationship with the person at the time the other facts became known?
During an interview with Ross Solly on 26 April, five days after it became public that data had been tampered with and 13 days after the Chief Minister became aware of the full situation, Ms Gallagher said, “We have nothing to hide here.” She then went on to say, when questioned if she had spoken to the person involved—another opportunity to come clean about the nature of her relationship:
No I haven’t … and I don’t think an explanation has been offered at this point of time. I just don’t think you can speculate about why it was done.
Later that same day Mr Hanson asked the head of the Health Directorate, Dr Peggy Brown, whether there was any personal relationship involved. To this question, she refused to answer. Only then, after days of discussion and missed opportunities, did the government think it wise to disclose a vague connection to the Chief Minister.
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