Page 1625 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 18 May 1994
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Mr Kaine: He has not even mentioned clause 1 yet, and he has talked about a whole range of possible amendments.
MADAM SPEAKER: Thank you, Mr Kaine.
MR CONNOLLY: Madam Speaker, I am trying to take a sensible approach to this and not play petty, silly politics. I would hope that members opposite would exercise a little bit of grey matter on this. As I was saying, we had a problem in that the Bill proposed to deal with the publicly stated problem of appointments to boards and committees. The Bill, on my advice, covered potentially everyone from a judge to the secretary of a department.
I wrote to every member of this Assembly in about the middle of April. I do not have my dated copy of the letter, but I think members would recall the letter that they would have received in late April. I indicated to members that this Bill had been agreed to in principle but the Government still had some concerns about it and we wanted to make it workable. I suggested to every member of this Assembly who received my letter that they might like to come back to the Government and have some discussion about who should be in and who should be out. Should the Bill apply to everybody? Should the Bill apply to everybody apart from judges and possibly magistrates? What is the position of the Master of the Supreme Court? Is the Master of the Supreme Court a judicial officer or an administrative officer? You could have an extensive debate on that. It is a very complicated issue. Mr Moore's proposal in the Bill as now drafted looks at appointments by Ministers and not appointments by the Executive, and that probably fixes judges.
After discussion with Mr Moore and Mr Humphries last week I said that we would try to look at what that means across the board, across the hundreds of pieces of legislation of this Assembly. Is a distinction between ministerial and Executive appointments a sensible matrix for sorting out the policy question? The advice that I am getting from the department is that they have not been able to finish that task yet, but there does seem to be an element of randomness as to who is in and who is out.
As I say, we have acted in good faith. I wrote to all members saying, "It is clear that the wish of the Assembly is that the parliament have a role in vetting appointments. Can we work out what should be covered? Should we cover everybody? Should we cover the appointment of secretaries of departments?". I raised the problem of that myriad of appointments which are at comparatively low levels in the public service but which are statutory appointments, such as when Mr Wood signs an instrument to appoint somebody at a comparatively low public service level as the dog catcher. As another example, a position in my portfolio was recently advertised and filled - the position of Director of Consumer Affairs, a senior officer grade A job. A merit selection public service process is followed. Members, one would assume, would not want to be getting into that, but because that position has a statutory function the Minister has to sign a piece of paper. I signed the piece of paper appointing the successful applicant to that position following the merit selection process. Should that type of appointment be subject to review by the Assembly when we are basically ratifying a straight merit selection process?
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