Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .
Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (28 June) . . Page.. 2130 ..
MR BERRY
(continuing):Mr Speaker, you are saying that if at any point committee members offend the standing orders or impute improper motives, whether true or not, we have to pass an amendment like the one before us to try in some way to water down the suspicions of particular members of Assembly committees. That is a nonsense. You cannot do that. If you want to go for John Hargreaves about what he said in the report, why don't you just go for him? Why don't you just move a substantive motion and deal with it? Why don't you just do it? Why don't you have the courage of your convictions, instead of trying to interfere in such a gross way in the committee process?
I do not care so much about what is said in this report but I do care strongly about the approach that you are taking. I am prepared to enter into a debate with you if you are prepared to move some sort of substantive motion in relation to these matters. If you think the sort of amendment that you have moved will change the suspicions of the community about your actions, you are kidding yourself. This does not change a damn thing. The Speaker can rule things out of order that are utterly true. The amendment is made up of a meaningless set of words anyway because they do not mean a thing.
The purpose of my amendment is to point out that Mr Humphries' amendment does not mean a thing in terms of the law or what people outside of this place might think. The standing orders relate to the behaviour of people in this place-not in committees, not outside. They relate to behaviour in this place when it is in session. So to try to impose those sorts of values on a committee process seeks to undermine that process. It seeks to gag members of the Justice and Community Safety Committee and force them to use language which suits the Attorney-General.
It may well be that to suit the Attorney-General everybody has got to refer to him as "sweetie", "petal", "rosebud"-all those sorts of things-and say, "We're on side with you, Gary." Whenever we refer to the-
MR
SPEAKER: Order! The member's time has expired.MR
HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (12:22): Those names from Mr Berry's mouth are very attractive. I like them but I am not sure I like Mr Berry.Mr Speaker, I will be very brief in speaking to Mr Berry's amendment. Mr Berry has not explained why these words are necessary. He has spoken in general about my amendment but not about why his words are necessary. I think the words compromise my amendment. They are intended to create the impression that the comments made by Mr Hargreaves might be true when, as I have already indicated, there is no evidence whatsoever that they are true. Indeed, the comments were not even put to either me or Mr Osborne in the course of evidence before the committee. So how could they even be tested to see if they are true?
The question that members need to ask themselves is: why is it that the Labor Party has spent so many hours over this week and previous weeks trying to get this matter reported out in the public arena in the form that they want? The reason is that they want these assertions repeated outside this place but they do not have the guts to make those claims
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .