Page 875 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 2 May 2007
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which lists the qualities of openness, responsibility and accountability as qualities that will frame the manner in which the Labor government in this territory will go about its business.
That was in the Chief Minister’s speech. I remember the speech quite well. I was not there, but it was widely reported and everyone said, “Ooh, ahh, Jon Stanhope—a clean breath of air,” et cetera. But what have we got here today? When he addressed the Labor Party breakfast back in 2001 and he talked about this he said that governments are not boards of directors. He said:
There is a broad public interest that must be at the heart of everything governments undertake, a public interest that insists on government being fair, open and responsible.
These are … Labor’s core values … and they are qualities that will characterise a Stanhope Labor Government.
Let us see how those qualities have been characterised this week. Ms Porter has just quoted someone who at length has said, amongst other things, that because of the nature of corporate credit cards these devices should be open to additional scrutiny. And what happened in here today and yesterday when the opposition had the temerity to scrutinise the use of corporate credit cards in this territory? We had the usual running off at the mouth: how dare the opposition do this; how dare the opposition undermine the integrity of the public service; how dare we attack public servants. There was not one public servant named by this opposition. Even though those people had been named, on some occasions publicly, no opposition member named a person.
No opposition member claimed that any expenditure was inappropriate, except where a public official had already admitted that that was inappropriate expenditure and had repaid the money. There were questions asked about whether this was appropriate expenditure and whether or not the government was satisfied that the people of the ACT got value for money out of this. There have been occasions when money has been repaid because the public officials themselves have said that that was wrongly done, and on that occasion, the only occasion, there was an intimation that that was inappropriate expenditure.
But the response of the Chief Minister was not one of openness and accountability. If he was concerned about openness and accountability when this issue was raised publicly by the Canberra Times back in mid-February he should have been entirely briefed. His Deputy Chief Minister was briefed; she knew what expenditure had been questioned in her department. She was across the brief and she could answer the questions. I suspect that there were other ministers on the government benches who knew what had been going on in their departments when those issues were raised publicly in the Canberra Times.
But the Chief Minister was absolutely and utterly off his game. He did not know. He does not understand. He showed a complete lack of grasp of the brief of being the Treasurer. His only recourse is to say that it was unjustifiable for us to scrutinise it—when his own government documents say that elevated and additional scrutiny is necessary for corporate credit cards to ensure that everything is above board.
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