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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 8 Hansard (25 August) . . Page.. 2357 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

They took it as a personal affront that he would suggest that there is corruption. It is a well-known and well-respected police force that we have here in the ACT. We have to distinguish between the community that is Canberra and what Canberrans will tolerate as a community and what happened in other States.

In other jurisdictions where corruption commissions were established there was clearly a need. There is no need here, Mr Speaker. For instance, the New South Wales ICAC was established against the backdrop of the imprisonment of a former Chief Magistrate, Clarrie Briese, and a former Cabinet Minister, Rex Jackson, and there were trials of senior officials and controversy about the circumstances of the discharge of the Deputy Commissioner of Police. Public concern about institutionalised police corruption was such that even with an ICAC in place there was then a royal commission.

In Queensland the Criminal Justice Commission was established against a like background. There were prosecutions and convictions of members of the Government and senior police. The Fitzgerald inquiry looked at all those issues. But what do we have here? We have a solution looking for a problem. We have something that is trying to create a smell, something that is trying to taint a community in which this level of corruption does not exist.

You would think, Mr Speaker, that when someone puts a motion on the table saying that the Assembly notes the need to legislate, we would get evidence. You would think there would be public outcry and that you would hear reports. Given that we have legislation protection and we have people in Canberra who are often willing to come forward and point out failings of government or corruption, where are all these reports that obviously should be in the Canberra Times? There are none. The opportunity to put one or two cases on the table to create a sense that there is an epidemic of crime or corruption out there was not taken by the man that puts forward this legislation. Why? Because he cannot. It just is not there.

Canberra is a very special community in respect to our knowledge and our understanding of the law, and all the MLAs here could testify to the willingness and the keenness, in some cases, of their constituents to come forward and point out the failings of the system. I am certainly not being inundated by those.

Mr Kaine called it the creeping cancer of corruption. We all know how cancer is treated, Mr Speaker. Cancer is treated by a couple of means. You ignore it, you give it a dose of chemotherapy or you hit it with surgery, or you use a combination of all of those. There is nothing to ignore here, Mr Speaker, because there is no hint of a creeping cancer. Where is the side effect of this cancer that is pulling our society down? Where is the side effect of Trevor Kaine's creeping cancer of corruption that is destroying the moral fibre of the people of the ACT, of its police force and of its public servants? Mr Speaker, it does not exist. But Mr Kaine wants to issue to us as a community a dose of legislative chemotherapy to fix something that does not exist. We all know that, like chemo, the cure is often worse than the disease in terms of how it affects you. We know about the sickness, the weight loss, the hair loss and all those other horrible side effects. We know about the miserable time that people go through when they are under chemotherapy. But Mr Kaine is willing to dose up the ACT with his legislative chemo.

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