Page 1394 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 13 May 2014
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So the Chief Minister in effect suggested they had talked about it in the party room. However, then when we questioned Mr Gentleman, the chair of the committee, he said:
The caucus discusses many items of the planning and environment committee work—but no detailed items about this particular inquiry.
Therefore, there is real doubt about how Minister Corbell got this information. It was not in the minutes. It was not said in a speech. We now hear that it was not said in the party room. So where did it come from? That is why we need a privileges committee. If there is a leak in this place, we need to find who it is. If the minister is inappropriately obtaining confidential information, then what confidence can we have in the committee system or in the Assembly as a whole?
Madam Speaker, this goes to the integrity of this place and it is for that reason that anything short of a privileges committee would be a tacit endorsement of this kind of behaviour. We cannot endorse the leaking of information to a minister, and that is, in effect, what we have here. What is more, we are talking about the minister the committee was meant to be advising. We are talking about a planning committee inquiry giving information to the minister who was in the process of trying to get a bill enacted in this place. If future planning committee dealings are going to be leaked to the planning minister, I think we will have very few witnesses come before our committee, we will have very limited deliberations and we will have even greater inefficiencies in how committees are conducted.
Madam Speaker, I urge members to support the establishment of the privileges committee. We owe it to the integrity of this place that such a committee be established.
MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Chief Minister, Minister for Regional Development, Minister for Health and Minister for Higher Education) (3.31): The government will not be supporting this motion. Mr Coe speaks as though there has been a leak of information. He is judge and jury in this case and we do not accept that at all. In fact, we completely reject that. We do not believe this warrants a privileges inquiry to be established into it, and we will not be supporting it.
As I said in my comments last week, because of the hung parliament and the way the committees are operating—we all know how that is going because we are all talking about it, the whole building is talking about it—there needs to be some way for there to be discussion on procedural matters as they relate to the Assembly when there are issues with the committees.
I have had those discussions with Mr Hanson, I have had those discussions with Madam Speaker, and I have had those discussions with my colleagues. If that constitutes a privileges committee then I would imagine all of us need to appear before a privileges committee, because I doubt there is one person in this Assembly who has not discussed how the procedures in the committees are operating or not
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