Page 1398 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 11 May 1994
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setting out to achieve, which is to increase accountability. Often, of course, we are talking about corruption, but we are also talking about misuse of money, which may not have a corruption element about it but may well have just an element of poor decision making that people may misconstrue as corruption.
These Bills both provide an appropriate opportunity for people to have room to blow the whistle, and so they should. To ensure that we have the utmost accountability, the best system is for us to take the best parts of both Bills. We are very fortunate at the moment to have a select committee looking into the ACT public service. There can be no better way to deal with this than to ensure that that committee has the opportunity to look at both Bills and to choose the best parts from the two and put them together. It does not worry me one iota whether the final version comes through as Mrs Carnell's Bill or as Ms Follett's Bill. The point is that the Liberals were working on this long before the Government started working on it and they have come up with a good result.
Mr Lamont has indicated to me privately that he is interested in moving a motion to refer this matter to the Select Committee on the Establishment of an ACT Public Service. That committee may need a little extra time because the task we have given them is already huge, and I think they need to be able to do this effectively as well. I do not see that as necessarily delaying the process; the process could well be geared, in terms of debating the legislation tabled by the Chief Minister with reference to the public service, to the select committee report. But it is important that that select committee have the appropriate opportunity within the timeframe I understand all members have agreed on and that we are trying to move towards - for the public service transition to occur by the middle of the year. I think we can have the best possible result by using that approach, and I look forward to Mr Lamont putting that motion and will have pleasure in supporting it. We can then work towards what is best for the people of the ACT rather than what is in the best interests of one or other of the parties.
MR HUMPHRIES (11.57): Madam Speaker, I indicate that the Opposition welcomes the Government's late conversion to the cause of whistleblowing. It is very good to see that they have seen the light on the subject. I must say, however, that there are some signs that it is not fully comfortable with the concept, and one has to suspect that they might have jumped on the band wagon in order to steer it in a slightly different direction. Clearly, the principles guiding the legislation Mrs Carnell has put forward are principles of maximum capacity to disclose information which could in certain circumstances be thought to be in the public interest.
I think the Government's perspective is, rather, one of making a more rigid test of what is in the public interest, and therefore necessarily leaving public servants in some doubt as to whether they can or cannot disclose the information, and making the avenues for response to those sorts of disclosures more uncertain. That, I think, is a very good argument for not accepting the comments of the Chief Minister that there should be no consideration of this Bill in favour of her own Bill. I think that her Bill is designed, and I mean this with no disrespect, by public servants in the interests of, particularly, senior public servants. That is not the perspective Mrs Carnell's Bill has taken, and that is a very important reason why it needs to be under active consideration.
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