Page 5044 - Week 16 - Wednesday, 27 November 1991
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received from the Labor Party. Accordingly, the Bill before the house today is, except for a series of modifications which I will detail, the same as the Bill approved by the Alliance Cabinet.
The principal difference between the Bill approved by the Alliance Government and the Bill before the house arises from the need to delete those provisions which may offend the provisions of section 65 of the self-government Act, namely, those provisions which prevent the Opposition from dealing with public moneys. Accordingly, we have deleted the provisions relating to the remuneration and allowances of members of the Public Corruption Committee. I shall make those provisions available to the Government so that, if the Government is minded to support this Bill, it can introduce those provisions without any delay whatsoever because they are drafted in the standard form which all governments in this chamber have utilised.
A consequential amendment to the Bill also relates to staffing of the committee. Any provision that such staff be public servants would, of course, offend section 65. In any event, the Rally believes that the staff of the committee should not be public servants made available to the committee by the Head of Administration.
Accordingly, unless the Government wishes to intervene and provide for staff to be recruited and appointed and to hold office under this statute independent from the administration, the only alternative for the Opposition in moving this Bill is to provide that the staff shall consist of persons selected by the committee from applicants in response to an advertisement for members of the staff of the committee published in a newspaper circulating in the Territory. The Bill, as circulated, provides for the staff to consist of no more than three persons. In the detail stage the Rally will move to delete that figure and leave the size of the staff to the discretion of the committee.
The Rally believes that it is entirely appropriate in a city with such significant highly skilled retired or semi-occupied persons to recruit an independent body of this nature as volunteers. We believe that there will be no shortage of quality volunteers and that they would be persons who could be properly assessed and screened for appointment. It could not then be alleged in any way that they are compromised by direct employment and reporting under the Head of Administration. Likewise, the committee itself would, of course, subject to government decision, be unpaid and be selected from the community. The mechanism for selection of the committee is set out in the Bill and provides for a balanced, non-political framework of selection.
This Bill was drafted whilst I was Attorney-General. In that role, I took the opportunity whilst at a ministerial conference in Perth to visit the Western Australian Corruption Commission, which was referred to in the committee's report recommending the establishment of a
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