Page 1060 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 May 2020
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town—three unions that work for their members and stand up against bullies in the workplace. They stand up against unfair dismissals; they stand up against being told that they cannot get fair wages and conditions for their employees and their members.
I am a very proud union member, and I have made that very clear on every public interest disclosure form, every time I am asked about it in this chamber and at every committee hearing that I am asked about it. I have never once denied the fact that I am a proud union member. Does it colour my vision of the world? Maybe. Does it change my opinion about evidence that is put in front of me? No, never. If the evidence is there and if the evidence is true then it is true. No matter what my feelings are, it is about the evidence that is provided, and I do not feel that the parts of this report that I have dissented from—Ms Cheyne has also dissented—reflect evidence of fact. It has nothing to do with me being a union member; it has nothing to do with me standing up for the rights of workers. It has to do with factual information being provided, and I do not believe that, in parts of this report, there is factual evidence to support the recommendations that we have dissented from and the evidence provided.
I believe there was a little bit of a problem this morning with the printing of this report. I assume that the copies that Mrs Dunne will table will contain the updated corrections, but I am only making assumptions. Parts of the comments that Ms Cheyne and I made are provided throughout the report. Ms Cheyne made it very clear, in many of the minutes and at many of the meetings, where she disagreed.
I reiterate that Mrs Dunne and Ms Cheyne worked tirelessly. They worked on weekends; they worked after hours. After a meeting that I was unable to attend, due to a conflicting committee meeting, Ms Lawder could not get the technology to work successfully, so she also could not attend. Ms Cheyne and Mrs Dunne worked together, during that time that we had all set aside for that meeting, to come up with ways to make this report more accurate—not more palatable but more accurate. I think that is where we continue to disagree—as to where the report was not accurate.
I will leave my comments there because I know that Ms Lawder will probably have something to say; I can feel it in my bones. So be it. I was a proud member of this committee, and I appreciate the work that Mrs Dunne and Ms Cheyne did to get this report to where it got to. I have moved from dissenting from the whole report to dissenting from parts of the report. It comes nowhere to representing the inaccuracies in the original version that was brought to the committee, as opposed to the report that has been tabled today, which is a consolidated effort and represents a lot of hard work done by all of us on the committee.
MS LAWDER (Brindabella) (11.18): I am pleased to talk today about the Auditor-General’s report Tender for the sale of Block 30 Dickson. In my view it was quite a damning report from the Auditor-General, especially with respect to record keeping and probity relating to the sale of that particular block. PAC undertook an inquiry into the Auditor-General’s report. It was quite an extensive inquiry involving a lot of public hearings, as well as considerable hours of deliberations.
The recommendations and findings in the PAC report speak pretty much for themselves, if you read them. It is very much about conflicting accounts of what took
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