Page 2695 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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based its first two recommendations on addressing the problem of such inappropriate public demonstrations by ministers appearing at future hearings.
I think it is appropriate at this juncture to talk a bit about this. It was such a poor display, in the five years I have been in this place, that it ought to be put on the record. While Mr Gentleman clearly does not believe that Mr Hargreaves behaved badly during the hearings, evidence from the transcripts contradicts his misguided view. You might like to take a note of this, Mr Gentleman. The minister’s inappropriate comments about members of the committee included such phrases as: silly question from a silly person; Mr Smyth does not know anything; I am not going to answer any more questions from Mr Pratt on this subject; grow up, et cetera.
A further instance of completely inappropriate comments from this minister was when he said that an official was overseas “searching for some way of dealing sensibly with Mr Pratt”. He went on to say, “Unfortunately, I think she has gone a long way to try to find out how to do that, I have to tell you.” Minister Hargreaves also used some unparliamentary language later in the hearings. He attributed to a member of the committee the description of “dickhead comment of the week award”. Subsequently, Minister Hargreaves commented to a member of the committee, “If you did that … no-one would know you are deaf and a dill.”
While I balk at further sullying Hansard with examples of Hargreaves-speak, I think it is appropriate to pull all these examples out and package them as one, for the public record. This of course reflected his serial behaviour both in hearings and in this Assembly chamber generally. It was a very sad reflection because it really meant that the committee was unable to do its job properly—to properly scrutinise the operations of TAMS and the minister’s proposals and plans for how he was going to spend the money he needed to appropriate to make that department work. We did not get anywhere near scrutinising and making comment about the operations of TAMS because of this minister’s abhorrent behaviour. Estimates scrutiny provides the major opportunity for the Assembly to assess the performance of the government, the public service, and its administration of government policy and programs.
The estimates process is a wide-ranging examination of expenditure, and it has also evolved into an evaluation of performance. The overall effect of estimates is to keep executive government accountable and place a great deal of information on the public record, yet the TAMS minister consistently hampered the scrutiny process, contradictory to Mr Gentleman’s assertions. Not only was a majority of the estimates committee not happy with the minister’s behaviour, it also seems that employees and agencies within the TAMS department are not happy either, as recent media leaks detailing potential cuts to jobs and cuts to services have shown.
In this budget we see severe cuts to areas of essential services: shopfront losses, job losses, cuts to municipal services, lack of road funding, possible library closures, et cetera. At the same time we see massive increases in taxes and fees on the community, such as pay parking in hospitals. All of these essential areas that the government should make their first priority are being relegated to the back seat while the Stanhope government’s massive and wasteful expenditure on ideological pet projects such as the arboretum, the Belconnen to city busway—which is still on the drawing board, by the way—and the prisons continues.
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