Page 4756 - Week 15 - Thursday, 21 November 1991
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I believe that the Attorney is going to say, "This will all be resolved on the national stage. We will all get together at intergovernmental committee meetings and we will resolve this". Not many Attorneys in this country have had the background and access to the types of activities that agencies of this nature get into that I have had. I say no more. When I was Attorney, I watched very carefully how our involvement in the NCA evolved. I supported it; but my support was always predicated on the belief that when we brought our legislation in I would ensure that it avoided the sorts of debacles that occurred in South Australia, the gross travesties of justice that occurred there.
Amazingly, and paradoxically, these occurred to the Attorney-General himself, who was mistaken for someone who had been going to a brothel. Some sharp investigator put that together with knowledge that the Attorney happened to speak fluent Italian and came up with some utterly preposterous findings on the Attorney in the infamous Operation Hydra. If you want to vote against this, do so; but I am sure I will say to you in due course, "I told you so".
MR HUMPHRIES (10.57): I want to put on record fairly clearly that the Liberal Party has not chosen lightly to reject Mr Collaery's amendment. We have certainly considered carefully what he has had to say, both today and earlier, about the importance of scrutiny by parliament. I rose earlier today to emphasise how important the Liberals felt it was that there be scrutiny by the Assembly of the budgetary progress of the Department of Health, for example. So, I am certainly not opposed to parliamentary scrutiny.
I have to say that the information provided to us by the Attorney-General's Department on this subject was persuasive. I also point out that Mr Collaery was not able to provide information from any other source that clearly was a reference to the scrutiny of parliaments other than the Federal Parliament, of which the NCA is a creature. If there had been such information, I would have been very interested to read it and to compare that view with the view put forward by the Attorney in this parliament. But there was no such information and, regrettably, I felt that we had to accept that it was not appropriate for the ACT Legislative Assembly to play some role in being the repository of information about activities conducted by the NCA.
I also should point out that Mr Collaery made an inaccurate historical reference when he talked about the Rum Rebellion and other putsches against the New South Wales parliamentary process. Of course, the Rum Rebellion occurred some decades before New South Wales had any form of parliamentary democracy. That is not a compelling reason to vote against his amendment; it is merely incidental to that.
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