Page 3797 - Week 12 - Thursday, 24 October 2013
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(ii) the Member concerned has taken such action to rectify the failure as the Commissioner may have required within any procedure approved by the Committee for this purpose.
(e) The Commissioner must not make a report to the Committee unless the Commissioner has—
(i) given a copy of the proposed report to the Member or the Speaker who is the subject of the complaint under investigation;
(ii) the Member or the Speaker has had a reasonable time to provide comments on the proposed report; and
(iii) the Commissioner has considered any comments provided by the Member or the Speaker.
(f) The Commissioner must report by 31 August each year to the Speaker on the exercise of the functions of the Commissioner.
(12) The Committee must review the operation of the Commissioner after two years following the initial appointment of the Commissioner and report to the Assembly in the first sitting period in 2016.”.
We will support this motion today. This arises out of a bunch of work that has been done in committee, but it needs amending. I have worked with the Chief Minister on this matter to essentially clean it up and make sure it is workable, and just as the Chief Minister moved amendments to clean up the code of conduct, the amendments that I have circulated will have the same effect. They do not change anything substantive in what we are trying to achieve with regard to the appointment of a commissioner for standards, but it is important that we get this right, and that is what these amendments do.
I will not go through all the details, but, as Mr Rattenbury alluded to in his speech, there is some ambiguity and room for confusion and omission in the motion he has moved. My amendment includes a new paragraph (1), which puts a time frame on each appointment of a commissioner for standards such that any one appointment lasts for the term of the Assembly plus three months. Otherwise there would be an argument that once the commissioner was appointed he or she could not be unappointed—or that is certainly ambiguous.
The amendment also creates three clear avenues for complaint to clarify the confusing mix in the original motion of who can do what and to whom and why. The first avenue deals with who can make complaints to the Speaker about a member, on what grounds and then what the Speaker can do with that complaint. The second avenue deals with who can make a complaint to a member about the Speaker, on what grounds and then what the member can do with that complaint. And the third deals with the grounds on which a member on their own initiative can make a complaint about the Speaker to the Deputy Speaker and then what the Deputy Speaker can do with that complaint. If a complaint is referred to the commissioner, another process then comes into play.
An important addition in my amendment is the threshold process the commissioner has to follow in deciding whether to investigate the complaint. The commissioner will
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