Page 604 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 4 July 1989
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particular lesson for us in the ACT, simply because in that State all the organs of civilised democratic endeavour broke down, and they have to be reconstructed out of a wholly separate justice commission. That vast task falls upon a very large commission that will be established in Queensland.
In that respect, the Rally interprets Mr Fitzgerald's comments about the establishment of an independent commission against corruption being inappropriate as being inappropriate for Queensland, but of course that type of commission has started in New South Wales. All those who read the newspapers know how effective it is already proving itself to be, how much public funds will be saved, how many publicly funded projects will proceed honestly and how much the public revenue will be saved from the milking activities of those powerful, corrupt people who are always out there to exploit the system.
Mr Speaker, the Fitzgerald inquiry also referred to problems associated with the excessive power of the Executive. This minority Government is forced, grudgingly, to consult with us. One shudders to think how we would have ended up in this Assembly if those Labor members opposite me had achieved absolute power in their own right. The statement today includes a comment about some specific measures that the Labor Party has adopted. The Chief Minister tends to take credit for the pressures and the pull and push of this Assembly which pushed her into creating, or at least not disagreeing with, a couple of initiatives.
To take credit for them is a cheap point; it is a smug point. She used words - this is a message, of course, to her scriptwriters - such as "popularism" or "populist" sentiments. Popularism and populist ideas are a noble ideology; they express the power of the people, the power of grassroots, the power of the poor, to have a say. Populist politics are not in themselves a wrong thing. So that is a complete misreading of what was happening in Queensland; that was the very opposite. It was not a populist government; it was a club scene of the corrupt.
Mr Speaker, the common law and the criminal codes in Queensland proved inadequate to deal with that level of behaviour. Bribery, secret commissions, false accounting, advantage by criminal fraud and all manner of secret dealings cannot be attacked any longer in our society by established criminal codes or by the common law. What is required is that there be a criminal justice system that can change and adapt itself to modern requirements to protect us from the depredations of the powerfully corrupt. The role of an independent commission against corruption will surely be through the recommendations which hopefully will come out of the Public Accounts Committee of this Assembly to establish a body which will prevent law breaking and recommend changes to laws so that we have, in the ACT, one of the best systems of government that we can have.
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