Page 1683 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 21 August 2007
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I have moved this motion under the authority of standing order 71, which states:
(e) if, in the opinion of the Speaker, the matter merits precedence, the Speaker will inform the Assembly of the decision, and the Member who raised the matter may move a motion without notice forthwith to refer the matter to a select committee appointed by the Assembly for that purpose.
Mr Speaker, on the basis of your ruling, that is exactly what I have done here this morning. The behaviour of Mr Hargreaves during the 2007-08 estimates committee hearings is not an isolated issue. This is not a frivolous matter. Consequently, the behaviour of Mr Hargreaves in this estimates period is simply the culmination of a couple of years of bad behaviour by Mr Hargreaves in this place, in the committee process and, generally speaking, in his performance as a minister, having regard to the way he treats the processes here with some contempt and to the way that he treats the public. Consequently, Mr Speaker, I have had no choice other than to take the action that I have taken in writing to you about this issue.
As I was saying, this motion is based on contemptuous behaviour which we have seen on many occasions. Consequently, I would put it to you, Mr Speaker, that this is a serial-offence issue. It is important to look at the history of Mr Hargreaves’s contemptuous behaviour in order to set the background against which his behaviour during the estimates hearings in 2007-08 can be seen. I will refer briefly to the performance and behaviour of the minister during the 2006-07 estimates process. In relation to last year’s estimates committee process, Mr Gentleman, who chaired the committee, in that instance did not believe that Mr Hargreaves had behaved badly during those hearings, even though the evidence from the transcripts certainly contradicted that misguided view.
In the estimates process last year, the minister’s inappropriate comments about members of the committee included phrases such 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 the subject,” “Grow up,” et cetera. A further instance of completely inappropriate comments from the 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.
Looking at each of those examples of Mr Hargreaves’s 2006 estimates performance, individually they are not particularly offensive. We are all pretty tough types in this place. MLAs have to rock and roll in the rough and tumble of debate. Those sorts of issues which I have just mentioned are mere ripples. But when you put them all together, as we have done with last year’s estimates hearings, you see that they amounted to a collapse of the scrutiny process. That is the point we are coming from when we deal with what we might call the tier 3 level of behaviour, where we get this diatribe: “Silly old fella,” “Silly old goat,” “Well, he wouldn’t know, would he?” et cetera.
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