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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (25 May) . . Page.. 1910 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

Mr Osborne also said that he was concerned because of Mr Kaine's inquiry into integrity that has yet to be done. It is basically an ICAC-type thing. I remind Mr Osborne and Mr Rugendyke that we have an inquiry into policing services imminent, yet it was fine to support extra funding for a change in the way in which we deliver policing services in this city. I supported that too, but I did caution him that it was inappropriate that we support it now because we had an inquiry into it. I was not making any judgments about the wrongness or rightness of that proposal.

In fact I recall having a conversation with Mr Rugendyke about this. He will remember this, Mr Speaker. I said that whilst I support the initiative, perhaps it was not a wise idea because we had not had that police inquiry. The majority of members on my committee decided to endorse that. They said, "No, we will go ahead with that anyway." So, in the interests of compromising, I said, "Okay, fine, we will go with it," and I endorsed that part of the report. But now we are getting the opposite view. We have to hang off there because we have not got this integrity thing going yet. There is an inconsistency there.

I would have preferred in this instance that any inquiry into the propriety of conduct of members in this place be given at least a fair shot of being done independently. It would be nice if those people who were involved in receiving the evidence were not involved in the process; if there was a fresh approach, an independent approach, to it. I think that would have been the fairer thing to have done in this particular case.

I find it very difficult to see how some sort of prejudice of any type cannot be introduced into the process if this thing is referred to that particular standing committee because they have already heard all sides of the argument before. They have heard all the rhetoric here before and they have seen all the material before. I believe it would be in the best interests of the minister if this thing were done freshly by somebody else. If this is the only mechanism for doing that, then that is the way we should do it and give him a fair go. We would expect nothing less ourselves than a fair go. That is the fairest thing to do, to give him a fair shot at it.

I will finish on this, Mr Speaker. We all know the rules about pairing. We know what happens. As Mr Stanhope says, we sympathise when a member is called away for family reasons. Nobody would wish that, Mr Speaker. We actually sympathise with that. We don't make a big kerfuffle about it. What we are seeing here is not Mr Osborne saying, "I demand my right to have a vote." What we are seeing here is Mr Super-number-cruncher over here organising the vote to suit himself when it suits himself.

I implore members not to go with this. Mr Osborne ought to do the honourable thing here and recognise the fact that this is not the first time. Tonight is not the first time we have had an eight-all vote in this place. Neither is it the first time that we have had 16 members cast votes. That is nothing unusual, and the will of the Assembly spoke at that time.

If we make mistakes when we vote because things are confusing, fine, but there was nothing confusing about that debate. There was nothing confusing about that at all. If you make a mistake like that it is nothing short of stupidity, and I do not think that occurred this time. I am sure the votes were cast properly. If you go back and do your numbers you will see that those votes were inevitable, but they do not suit these people over here, so now we have this spurious nonsense. I implore Mr Osborne to reflect on that.

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