Page 330 - Week 03 - Thursday, 1 June 1989
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MR COLLAERY: Just hold on and you will get yours.
MR SPEAKER: Order!
MR COLLAERY: Clearly, it is an emotive situation. The Rally's view is that this Assembly cannot establish a body such as that on a recriminatory basis; on the basis that we look to the past necessarily and try to hunt down or track down, as it were, people who we think have been in situations of that nature.
The Rally simply wishes to indicate to the people of the ACT that there is a sufficient pattern of activity and there is sufficient precedent elsewhere in Australia and in the developed regions of the Western world to justify a type of standing committee, the terms of reference, powers and membership of which are to be determined - hopefully on a bipartisan basis - by this Assembly.
The Rally does not propose that the commission be a creature of this Assembly, that this Assembly turn itself into a Star Chamber of private investigation and crusader-like zeal on corruption.
Mr Whalan: Changed your mind, have you?
MR COLLAERY: The Rally's view has always been that we need a model corruption body, such as has been established in Hong Kong - undeniably successfully established - and is now under way in Sydney. I note reports in today's "Sydney Morning Herald" and today's "Canberra Times" indicating that there is some inquiry afoot in relation to activities of possibly a criminal or quasi-criminal nature in relation to Waverley Council. That is the type of issue which keeps morale high in the public administration. It means that all those innocent and hardworking public servants do not have to continue about their daily lives with the slur and the innuendo that comes about when there are individual breakdowns in good sense, conflict of interest situations and situations where the public servants involved have not been able to extricate themselves from situations that they should have declared initially.
In the Rally's view, in some situations it is clear that standards have not been set adequately at senior levels in the ACT Administration. The Rally believes that the model established in New South Wales is for a State with a large population and a very high industry and public sector infrastructure. The model for Canberra could be one with like powers and a like determination to see that wrongdoing is brought to book but not with that same structure, the same costs and the like.
If my friend, the Deputy Chief Minister, is to accuse the Rally of making unsubstantiated allegations and the like, he is attempting to do the very thing that no-one in this chamber wants to do. We will not turn this chamber into
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