Page 3426 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 19 September 1990
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I am sure Dennis will be absolutely delighted to hear that. Ted Mack continued:
The traditional propensity of government and the public service to secrecy must be reversed with an expansion of freedom of information and openness at all levels of administration. The Ombudsman's powers should be widened and public scrutiny and accountability improved at all levels of executive and bureaucratic administration and policy-making.
I think that Ms Follett's motion today applies that same notion to the Assembly. He continued:
The present restriction on freedom of information by exorbitant charges and manipulation of privacy provisions must be eliminated.
But, more importantly, he actually referred in his maiden speech to the ACT Government, and that is what I come to now:
If principles such as these are adopted then effective electoral, parliamentary and constitutional reform can commence. But if change is attempted on its traditional basis of seeking advantage on a party or personal basis then we will continue to create such "pictures of Dorian Gray" as the ACT Government.
I thought I would take this opportunity to refer to The Picture of Dorian Gray, for those of you who do not know it, and just see how it does apply to the ACT Government because, of course, in this book Oscar Wilde was dealing with ethics and integrity. I am disappointed that Dr Kinloch is not here because I was also going to refer to the film The Seduction of Joe Tynan. This film has a similar theme in the sense that the move towards a lack of ethics is portrayed as something that happens slowly, little bit by little bit. I thought I would run through a few minimal quotes from Oscar Wilde's book to illustrate how this happens. On page 134 of this edition we find:
Was the face on the canvas viler than before?
For those of you who do not know The Picture of Dorian Gray, the simple thing is that the portrait that was painted of him wears all his sins and the face becomes disfigured because he lives the life of a libertarian and is not concerned about ethics at all but it - - -
Mr Duby: A libertine.
MR MOORE: A libertine, thank you; I was just getting a little ahead of myself there. Thank you, Mr Duby; I am glad to see that it is you who corrected me on that particular issue.
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