Page 4166 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 26 November 2013
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A person shall not, without reasonable excuse …
By the way, there is no excuse; no excuse has been offered and no claim of privilege has been mounted. Standing order 277(m)(ii) says:
A person shall not, without reasonable excuse …
and no excuses have been given; no privilege has been claimed—
(ii) refuse or fail to produce documents, or to allow the inspection of documents, in accordance with an order of the Assembly or of a committee.
It is quite clear what we asked for. It is quite clear that that has not happened. It is quite clear that the minister is in contempt of the Assembly. To make it even clearer, if people want to go back to the debates of September and October and read them, it is quite clear from the documents. To close, I will read a couple of comments from Mr Rattenbury:
Nevertheless, I think there should be a genuine public debate on the issue, and I think the community should have access to the material developed by Treasury to assist in the community’s understanding of these changes.
The Greens are committed to improving the transparency of government, and I have no doubt it is in the government’s best interest to provide more information to the community.
He went on to say:
I think the community has a right to access documents on the analysis of the impacts the taxation reforms implemented to date are expected to have over time, because that information is relevant.
He then went on to say:
What is relevant—and it is appropriate that documents be sought in that context—is the government has taken a set of decisions; the Greens have supported those. They are based on certain parameters and certain assumptions. That information should undoubtedly be publicly available. The Greens completely support that, and that is why I am endeavouring to acknowledge what I believe Mr Smyth was trying to do—that is, to get the modelling that lies under the tax reforms that have been made and the projections built into that. The community has a right to that information.
Madam Speaker, the community does not have that information. In fact, we do not actually know what information there is because a complete return has not been provided to the Assembly as yet. We know from the minister’s own words, both in committees and in this place, that they exist, and we know, from the document that he tabled as a purported response, he says, “This paper provides an overview of relevant modelling.” Just on that, he is damned by his own words. We did not ask for an
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