Page 1198 - Week 04 - Thursday, 4 May 2006
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Mr Speaker, I conclude simply by saying that this is an outrageous, pathetic attempt by this government to stack this inquiry and to make this inquiry into an activity which will bear little relevance to the role of this Assembly. It took poor old Mr Hargreaves five minutes to say something intelligent in his massive contribution to today’s debate. All we got from Mr Hargreaves—unfortunately, he is not here at present—was the classic Hargreaves slanging match whereby he picks on persons in this chamber one by one and simply plays the man and not the ball.
If that is the level of the government’s concern and if that is the level of Mr Hargreaves’s contribution to this question, the government certainly is not fair dinkum about debating why the format of this inquiry should be changed. Mr Speaker, I have to say that, if Mr Corbell had had a bit more real life experience, perhaps he would have understood the true importance of this inquiry in examining functionality and good governance. He does not because he does not care. He is simply a young man who has grown up in the hothouse of politics and for him it is simply a numbers game. Mr Corbell does not particularly care about making sure that this community holds this government accountable and examines its public servants, its officials, in terms of transparency. That is a great shame, Mr Corbell. You should be ashamed of the amendment that you have put up here today.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo) (12.02): I had not planned to speak but, as I have mentioned before, Karin MacDonald has a way of always bringing me to my feet to respond. If I could say generally first that it is part of a pattern and it has been well outlined by my colleagues. On the day of the 2004 election, what did Mr Stanhope say in the Canberra Times? He said, “Do not fear majority government. There is nothing to fear. We are going to do things just as they were. We are going to be fair, impartial, open and accountable.” This is another example of how that has not happened. Mr Pratt has put the argument well, as have Mr Smyth, Mrs Dunne, Mrs Burke and Mr Stefaniak, as to the pattern of this government of shutting down scrutiny. We saw that most notably with the appalling attempt to shut down the coronial inquiry, the appalling, disgraceful decision to pursue court action just so that the government would not have to answer the uncomfortable questions.
That is what this is about. We saw it last year. Ms MacDonald, as I said, gets me to my feet. Ms MacDonald had such a terrible time as chair last year because she just did not like the fact that Mr Mulcahy and I actually wanted to ask some questions of the government. She was very happy when the government backbenchers asked the 22 per cent of questions, or whatever it was, that they asked but it does not take very long and you do not need to ask many when you say, “Minister, could you please elaborate on that for us?” or “Minister, tell us about your wonderful policies.” It was just a joke.
I bet if you were to go and look at the time for some of these questions you would get a different answer. We actually had some questions to ask. We actually wanted to scrutinise the budget and we did not see any evidence of that from the government members. What we had with Karin MacDonald was a situation whereby every time there were some hard questions asked you might get one or two in but, if there was a third and you were actually getting somewhere, she would shut it down. That was our problem with the chair. The chair was there to protect to government. The chair was not there to
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