Page 3441 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 19 September 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Continuing the review, there is no ethics committee in the New South Wales Parliament. There is a Standing Orders Committee which can investigate matters of conflict of interest. There is a ministerial register of interests much like that which we have all supported on the establishment of this Assembly.
In Victoria there is no ethics committee. There have been various inquiries but nothing determinate. In South Australia there is no ethics committee and, similarly, their Privilege Committee is used for such issues. In Tasmania there is no ethics committee. All of this, I might add, was the case at the beginning of this year and I have no later research available. In the Northern Territory there is no ethics committee; there is a Privilege Committee and a register of interests. In Queensland, as we would have expected, there is no ethics committee and certainly there is a register of members' interests which no doubt has been subject to occasional takeover offers. In Western Australia there is no ethics committee and no register of interests but it is ALP policy to have such a register. I imagine that Carmen Lawrence has moved to establish one; I do not know.
In the United States Congress there is a committee on standards of official conduct and there is a code of official conduct in the House of Representatives. There is a standing committee on ethics in the United States Senate. But, as my colleague Mr Stefaniak pointed out, some of the value judgments and standards there may cause us to look very carefully at whether we want to have a similar structure operating in our context. The situation is unclear in the United Kingdom, but there is no set ethics committee as such in the House of Commons.
Many parliaments have been traumatised occasionally by specific inquiries. We all remember the Profumo affair and the variety of inquiries that have taken place in parliaments in Australia. They have all resulted in recommendations and I believe that it will be incumbent on the Administration and Procedures Committee to consider whether we need to have a standing in-house watchdog of the type proposed by Ms Follett or whether we should be careful and have regard to what has been done in the past and have individual inquiries with a membership reflecting the importance of whatever the problem is that has arisen in the house.
In such a small Assembly as this it may well be difficult, if there is an allegation against a member, for there not to be a conflict of interest there and then with our small numbers and the committee structure. I believe that we need to give very serious consideration, from a legal point of view, to a number of privacy, civil liberties and procedural issues evoked by the motion of the Leader of the Opposition. I trust that the Opposition will not leave the chamber after the forthcoming adjournment and issue a press release saying the Government opposes an ethics committee.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .