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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 5 Hansard (6 May) . . Page.. 1485 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

a lot of the officer being a DLO, a departmental liaison officer. Of us here, Mr Stanhope has not been a DLO. He has been a political staffer. You made the distinction, Mr Moore. There is a great distinction, as you well know, and I accept that.

When I was a DLO, I knew that whenever I represented myself as an officer from the Minister's office I represented the department which was my employer. I also represented the Minister's views. We do not allow public servants who represent themselves as having worked in a given office to express a personal view. That is the element of bureaucracy. We expect them to represent the views of their Minister. You would expect that if somebody was doing it in their private time they could have their own views.

Some mention has been made that the particular DLO, Ms X, went to the Benders as a member of the congress to offer whatever assistance she could. I have no difficulty with people who have private hats going and doing those sorts of things. Indeed, I would applaud it. When this sort of thing happens, any help we can get from these people is wanted - and accepted, I hope. (Further extension of time granted)

The point that I make here is that I do not believe that Ms X did actually represent herself as a member of that congress when speaking to the Bender family. I do not believe that, for two reasons. She has worked as a DLO for some four years, and knows only too well, as I have said before, that whenever you mention the fact that you work for a Minister people in this town can reasonably expect that you speak on behalf of that Minister. Normally, if you do not want people to have that sort of impression, it is a reasonable thing to tell them that you are not speaking on behalf of the Minister; that you are speaking on behalf of somebody else. In this case, we have a very serious issue. Everybody is in crisis on this sort of thing. It would seem to me that it would have been appropriate for the person to have said, "I am from our community, the Croat community, the congress". I would have expected that. Ms Anna Bender's statutory declaration says at point 5:

If she intended to represent herself as coming from the office of the Attorney-General, then that was the wrong thing to do and the Minister ought to take Executive responsibility for that. If she did not intend to do that, she should have corrected any impression that these people may have had, but did not take that opportunity. There is enough contrary information to wonder what on earth is going on, and I accept that. You have to work out- - -

Mr Rugendyke: Tell me about point 5 again, John.

MR HARGREAVES: Quote it for you? Certainly. Ms X went to the Bender house, and we have a statutory declaration from Mr Bender which at point 2 says:

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