Page 1258 - Week 05 - Thursday, 31 May 2007
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There is no excuse for this minister not coming in here this morning and saying, “When I said that I was not aware of any flagrant breaches of the protocol, when I said that yesterday in answer to Mr Stefaniak’s supplementary question, I made a mistake. With the assistance of the department, my office and Mrs Dunne’s office, my memory has been refreshed and I need to set the record straight.” That is all he had to do—and he would not do it. He did not do it, despite being given the opportunity at about 10 o’clock this morning and being given a warning at about 10 o’clock this morning that we would take this action.
We are not doing anything untoward or undercover here. This has not been sprung on him. I waited for the minister to come in. He arrived here early with a great big pile of papers and nothing was done. Nothing was done, and I am quite disappointed because I have considerable regard for the minister and I thought that he would rise above the pettiness that you might expect from Mr Corbell, who would put off as long as possible having to correct the record and then at the last minute say, “I am really very sorry,” when he was under pressure.
What has happened here is a very important breach of the thing that makes this or any other parliament work—that we have to deal honestly with one another. We may disagree, we may have differences of opinion and we may have differences of policy, but the cardinal rule in this place is that you tell the truth and, if you do not tell the truth, for whatever reason, you come and fix the record. I would have been satisfied with this minister standing up and saying, “Yesterday I made a mistake. I overlooked an incident. I am happy to talk to members privately about this incident.” But he did not do it and that is why this minister should be censured. He should be censured so that he will learn and not repeat these mistakes.
These are important issues that go to the heart of parliamentary life. It is quite simple. When we go back through the correspondence we see correspondence from the parents who wrote to the minister and wrote to me and raised these issues. In response to that, almost immediately, my staff wrote to the minister’s staff—because I was not here, they did what good staff should do. They took the matter up as senior staff to senior staff and asked that this matter be raised with the minister. It is exactly the right thing to do. The parents have raised it. The parents have raised it with the minister. The parents have raised it with the school.
This is such a serious incident that the departmental officials should have told the minister immediately that it happened. As soon as the departmental officials knew that this had happened, the chief executive of the department of education should have told the minister. When Mr Stefaniak was the minister for education—and I have discussed this with him on a number of occasions—all sorts of incidents that happened in playgrounds and around the school were reported to him: “Minister, you need to know this happened at school today.”
I now know of two very serious instances where the department of education seem not to have told the minister when they became aware of serious events happening in ACT government schools. I am starting to have real concerns about confidence in the capacity of senior staff in departments to communicate with their ministers. Ministers should not be left in the dark about these things. Ministers do not get by with plausible
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