Page 2325 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 June 1994
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speeches about independence and how we are somehow compromising independence are shown to be nonsense when it was your Bill and your model that we are simply seeking to continue with, and the structure of a DPP that is staffed under the public service is a structure that applies throughout Australia. Nobody has gone to an alternative model.
In spite of the nonsense, I am pleased that Mr Humphries refrained from suggesting that there had ever been any interference with the independence of the DPP. The DPP has certainly made that very clear himself. In every annual report that has come before this place it has been made very clear that there has not been any attempt to interfere with his independence. This Government has a very proud record in defending the independence of the judiciary and the appropriate legal aid and DPP bodies. We are the only jurisdiction at the State or Territory level in Australia that has come into a parliament and sought to put through a resolution leading to legislation to entrench in our constitutional instrument, in our self-government Act, the independence of the judiciary. No government in Australia at the State level has done that apart from this Territory's Labor Government. To suggest that there is somehow a plot to interfere with the independence of the judiciary or the legal arm of government is really too offensive to even deserve serious comment.
I wanted to intervene to make the point that the DPP model that we brought before the Assembly and which Mr Kaine says is fundamentally flawed is in fact simply continuing the model that he chose. He made a decision, when his Cabinet introduced the DPP legislation, not to create a separate basis of statutory employment for employees in the Director of Public Prosecutions' Office. It was the right decision, but you made it. To come in here now and suggest that that is fundamentally wrong in principle does require a leap of faith and of the imagination that only a Liberal politician would be capable of.
MR KAINE (11.55): I think that some of the nonsense just put forward by the Attorney-General needs to be refuted. The DPP is in love with himself a bit and some of the words he uses are a little bit over the top. He talked about hysteria. I have not seen any hysteria. This matter has been discussed, in my view, very moderately. I do not know what the Attorney-General's definition of hysteria is, but I have not seen any evidence of that. I have not seen it at the political level, and I have not seen it at the administrative level. So I do not know whom he is talking about when he is accusing someone of being hysterical.
He attributed to me the word "outrageous". I did not use that word. Madam Speaker, I thought that I put forward to the Government a very logical, unemotional argument that they should reconsider their position. It was not hysterical. It was not outrageous. I did not use the word "outrageous", and I do not believe that my speech was outrageous. There was no puffing of the chest. These are Mr Connolly's words. He thinks that by throwing these words out he defeats the argument. He does not.
Mr Moore: I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. I do not understand Mr Kaine's speech and I am seeking to clarify something. He started by saying that the DPP is in love with himself, and then he has argued that it is the Attorney-General. I wonder whether he meant to say "the Attorney-General" rather than "the DPP".
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