Page 1074 - Week 04 - Thursday, 1 April 1993
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I think it is the same with this situation. At face value Mr Stevenson thinks it is very obvious that Mr Connolly has misled this house, yet on reading the information available to us there is no misleading in any possible way in any of the three things that Mr Stevenson raises. Mr Connolly's term is that this is a silly censure motion. I think that what it reflects more than anything else is the black-and-white approach that Mr Stevenson takes to everything in life and the way he argues about everything. Solutions are very rarely in black and white. Instead of Mr Connolly being censured, for the second time this week we have a censure motion that is baseless.
As I indicated in my speech earlier this week when I read from House of Representatives Practice, a censure motion is basically a motion of no confidence in a Minister. It means that this Assembly is saying to the Chief Minister, "We are calling on you to remove that Minister from his portfolio because he is totally incompetent, or because he has misled the house, or because he has told lies, or because he is not acting within the law". They are the sorts of reasons why one moves a censure motion, and that should make the Chief Minister think, "Good heavens, what has this Minister done?". A censure motion should really, at the very least, tempt the Chief Minister to remove that Minister from his portfolio. That is the importance of what is supposed to happen here. Yet we get this drivel. That is what it is, Madam Speaker - drivel.
MR HUMPHRIES (3.46): Madam Speaker, let me take each of the claims Mr Stevenson has alleged in his motion and see what substance, what veracity we can give them. It seems to me that there are three essential claims that Mr Stevenson makes in his speech. One is that the letter that Mr Connolly sent to the Lone Fathers Association and the comments that he made in the Assembly with respect to the reasons for not attending the meeting of the Lone Fathers Association were inconsistent. It presumably follows that he was lying in one of those two cases. The second seems to be that comments that he made in this house on the 23rd of last month misrepresented the tone and content of the letter of invitation that was sent by the Lone Fathers Association. The third is that he has maligned and defamed Mr Williams and those two organisations that he heads or belongs to.
Treating them individually, it does seem to me, Madam Speaker, that the accusation that the Minister used language in this place which was different from language he used in his letter and that he was in those circumstances telling lies is in one very limited sense perhaps true; but, if it is true, then I think every one of us in this place would be guilty of an offence. That is because each one of us will use artificially polite language on occasions to respond to situations where we might not wish to proceed, or to accept an invitation or to do what someone requests of us in a letter - whatever it might be. I know that on many occasions I have politely declined or regretted that I am unable to attend, or used some other euphemism, when in fact my feelings were very different. I might almost have said, "You can go jump in the lake; I am not interested at all. Do not bother me any more".
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