Page 1161 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 6 April 2016
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I note that even Mr Hanson concedes this point: that the details of police operational matters need to be handled sensitively and have a high a degree of confidentiality around them, so it would be inappropriate for me to detail those in the Assembly today. But I reiterate: no criminal charges were laid and police expressed concerns about the handling of sensitive information. I am responding to those concerns and putting in place a series of additional measures on top of the long list that I have just outlined to the Assembly. I commend my amendment.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (11.45): I will speak briefly to this motion. We find ourselves in a very interesting situation. I will be interested to see how Mr Hanson responds to the statement that the Chief Minister has just made because Mr Hanson clearly has a series of questions about this, as others do.
Certainly this can only be described—and I do not think the phrase does it justice—as an unfortunate affair. Mr Hanson has a range of questions and the media has a range of questions, but the police are not willing to provide the answers to those questions. The Chief Police Officer has made very clear how far he is willing to go. The situation today potentially is that Mr Hanson is seeking to have the Chief Minister provide information that the Chief Police Officer has indicated he is unwilling to give.
If Mr Hanson is going to prosecute that approach after the statement that the Chief Minister has just given, in which the Chief Minister sought to outline a series of pieces of information that he was able to give, and if Mr Hanson is to prosecute the argument that the Chief Minister should go further than the Chief Police Officer has been willing to do, I ask him to articulate on what basis the Chief Minister should do that. Is that a precedent that will be the case in all matters or just the ones that have political interest attached to them? If Mr Hanson expects the Chief Minister to go beyond what the Chief Police Officer has said, that is fine, but let us have a serious discussion in this place about that, because I know the police will not be satisfied with that.
We in the Assembly may wish to have that information and, if that is the case, we need to have a serious policy discussion about how the Assembly seeks to access that sort of information. They do this in other parliaments. The federal parliament have national security committees that are briefed confidentially. It applies to a range of parliaments in the Western world. From popular culture, we know that they do these things in the US political system.
If that is the mechanism we want to have, if we want members of the Assembly to be briefed on this sort of information, we need to have a serious discussion about that and work out what the parameters will be. That is an interesting discussion to have because I suspect it would take some very careful negotiation. If we are not prepared to go down that path then I do not think Mr Hanson can come in here and ask the Chief Minister to disclose something that the Chief Police Officer has been unwilling to disclose.
Mr Barr has tabled the transcript of the Chief Police Officer’s press conference that he gave on 22 March. I will speak to some elements of that transcript because I think it is
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