Page 4037 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 22 October 1991
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MS FOLLETT: Mr Deputy Speaker, Mr Duby interjects, "She did not lie". The implication is that someone else has, and that ought to be withdrawn.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yes, I think you had better withdraw that, Mr Duby.
Mr Duby: I withdraw it.
MS FOLLETT: Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. Mr Connolly has acted completely correctly at all stages. I think that members opposite are churlish in the extreme in choosing to misinterpret the whole thrust of the debate at the Estimates Committee in this way and, following on from their own misinterpretation, to allege therefore that Mr Connolly has misled the house. He has not; his answers in question time last week and this week are entirely consistent. The view he has put has been the view consistently put by government Ministers with regard to the matter of staff reductions.
Mr Deputy Speaker, all I can say is that the members opposite have sunk to the point of moving motions like this on a matter which is purely semantics. Even they have admitted that the only evidence they have relates to one small part of one page of the thousands and thousands of pages of transcript from the Estimates Committee, and it is one small part of the Estimates Committee's deliberations which Ms Maher did not attend.
In conclusion, I can only say that Mr Connolly has my total support in his actions as a Minister, just as he has my total support in his handling of this matter. He has not misled the Assembly. He has not misled the Estimates Committee. Members opposite ought to have a bit more sense and concentrate on issues of substance rather than a shallow and empty argument over semantics.
MR JENSEN (4.41): I will be reasonably brief. The debate today is not about whether there would or would not be 200, 250 or even maybe more places cut out of the ACT public service by this Government's budget. The debate really is about whether a Minister, when answering questions, either in the Assembly or in a committee, should answer truthfully and not try to bluff his way through the questions. Ministerial graveyards, Mr Deputy Speaker, are full of Ministers who, like this Minister, often took it upon themselves to respond to questions when a more prudent response, the one adopted by the Chief Minister during the Estimates Committee, is to defer to ministerial advisers unless it is a policy question, when, quite frankly, it is appropriate for a politician to provide the political answer.
We have already heard about a letter of 1 October, some seven days prior to the Estimates Committee, which probably would have suggested the sort of answer that Mr Connolly should have given. Maybe, with hindsight, Mr Connolly
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