Page 4893 - Week 13 - Thursday, 2 November 2017
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not impact on its work. So what we saw was Mr Pettersson trying to stop an inquiry into the LDA and the corrupt Labor cultural practices, led by this Chief Minister. It was an attempt to distort the public accounts committee investigation. It was to protect their mates.
This might not be criminal, but corruption is more than criminality. It is the very core of the rotten state of affairs that this ACT community finds itself in with this government. Many people feel that corruption is a victimless crime. I disagree. Corruption affects many people; in fact corruption affects us all. It has a human cost. Corruption affects us in the ACT, each and every one of us. Each person is affected by the higher taxes they may be charged so that this Labor government can pay off their friends and pay off the unions.
However, this Labor government certainly has changed a few individuals’ lives negatively. I will speak about some of them today. These are some that are already on the public record, to respect the privacy of other people. I will talk about some who gave evidence to the public accounts committee in the very committee inquiry that Mr Pettersson tried to stop.
I will start by talking about Jim Seears. Jim was the owner of the paddleboat business on the lake. He said he was driven to the brink by negotiations with the LDA over its attempts to close his business. I found it so hard to watch his evidence, and I hope others did too. Explaining his torment to the committee hearing last month, he said:
I burnt everything … Because I was at the point of suicide at one stage over the way I was being treated by the LDA.
“I was at the point of suicide,” he said. The Chief Minister has led a government that bullied and humiliated Mr Seears to the brink of suicide. This is not good enough. The average person in the street would expect that their elected government would treat local small businesses better than this.
I would like to talk about Tim Xirakis, the former city to the lake project director. The Labor Party says it stands up for workers, but when a worker stands up to the Labor government they get sacked. Tim was told at 4 pm that he had to be gone by 5 pm on 9 September 2015. At 5.01 pm his calendar and contacts had been removed and his email stopped.
He said the officials:
… probably spent more time telling me about my confidentiality requirements than explaining why, after four years in multiple roles, I was being what felt like unceremoniously dumped.
When asked why he had been sacked, Mr Xirakis said he had no idea. He said:
I could only assume … Something I knew and brought up somewhere had really spooked someone and they thought the best course of action to deal with that was to remove me.
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