Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (29 February) . . Page.. 473 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (11.59): Mr Speaker, I wish to move an amendment to the motion, which I will table and ask to be circulated. Essentially, it deletes the words "table in" and substitutes the words "make available to members of". The motion would then read:

That the Chief Minister make available to members of the Legislative Assembly the Report ...

Mr Berry: She has to table the 10 pages and make the rest available.

MR HUMPHRIES: I think Mr Berry had a compromise there which I did not quite hear, but I am happy to entertain that.

Mr Moore: Let us turn it around the other way and take Mrs Carnell's second option, which is to table the document and hand us the 10 pages. We can seek to have that tabled later.

MR HUMPHRIES: Yes, that would be fine, Mr Speaker. I will withdraw my amendment.

MS FOLLETT (Leader of the Opposition) (12.01): I would like to speak very briefly on this matter, Mr Speaker. To be frank, I do not really understand Mrs Carnell's extreme nervousness about making public the information Mr Moore has sought. Mrs Carnell has indicated that there are three basic grounds on which she would seek to deny this information. The first ground she raised was that the report contains the details of contracts and that these matters ought to remain commercial-in-confidence. I could not disagree more. I believe that the contracts, if they are being paid from the public purse, are matters that could well be explored by, say, the Estimates Committee or the Public Accounts Committee, and in those circumstances the information would be made public. So I do not see what there is that is so unique about the information in the particular report Mr Moore has sought.

The matter of contracts is one that has been explored on many occasions, and I think it is a matter for great regret that on just about every occasion Mrs Carnell has sought to deny information that I believe should be public. We have seen the same approach to the contracts for senior officers. We have seen the same approach to the contracts for VMOs, where all we have seen so far has been the standard documentation and not any of the detail that I think would help both the Assembly and the community to form a much clearer picture. I do not believe that the Assembly ought to allow Mrs Carnell to persist with that argument.

Mrs Carnell has also said that there is much critical comment in this report. I have no doubt that there is, and, if Mrs Carnell wanted to ensure that the critical comment in the report protected, say, individual public servants, protected the Government from, say, a defamation action, then I do not believe that anybody in this Assembly would argue with that action being taken before the report was tabled. However, if we are going to try to hide away documents just because they contain critical comment, we are going to find

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .