Page 2490 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 29 June 2005
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Ms Gallagher: Mrs Dunne, the question that I took on notice was when did the committee meet, not when was it established.
MR SPEAKER: Order, minister!
Mr Seselja: No, the question was had it been established.
Ms Gallagher: You asked the wrong question.
MR SPEAKER: Order, minister!
MRS DUNNE: The correct answer would have been—
MR SPEAKER: Mrs Dunne, direct your comments through the chair.
MRS DUNNE: The correct answer would have been, “No, it has not been established but we are fixing the matter” and that would have been the end of it. What we have here is a minister who, as always, tries to cover her tracks.
Mr Stefaniak was quite fulsome in his praise of the minister in her capacity to get money to do something about Quamby because Quamby is a problem, and no-one denies that the minister has been very active in doing that. She does not have to go around prevaricating and hedging and being evasive on this because she has a record that she could stand by. You never like to get caught out. People on the other side really hate to be caught out, and instead of fessing up to a slip you have actually made it worse. You have misled the Assembly and you have misled the estimates committee. You have been evasive in your answer. You will not come in here and say, “Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry.” You will not fess up, sit down, end of story.
There are a whole lot of things that are still wrong with Quamby. The minister has been able, as she always seems to be when there is a problem in her department, to extract extraordinary amounts of money from an otherwise cash-strapped bureaucracy — $75 million for Vardon and $40 million for Quamby, which is probably money that needs to be spent. She has an amazing capacity to extract large sums of money from the budget process but at the same time there is all this sort of shoddiness and flim-flam around the edges.
The minister talked about the time-out room at Quamby. We cannot use the time-out room because the Community Advocate has not approved its use. The Community Advocate is concerned about the use of the time-out room. Let us be frank, Mr Speaker: what we call a time-out room is in fact solitary confinement. My latest advice is that the Community Advocate was seriously concerned about the lack of appropriate processes for using the time-out room, and its use had been put in abeyance for some time because of failures by the department to respond. These are things that need to be addressed.
This is about the culture of a department that cannot face up to the things that they do wrong. They might be little things or they might be large things. But instead of fessing up in a straightforward manner and putting things on the record in a straightforward way, we have to bob and weave; we have to hedge; we have to mislead.
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