Page 3050 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 17 October 2007
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Department of Territory and Municipal Services—surveillance of employees
Statement by member
MR PRATT: I seek leave to make a statement.
Leave not granted.
Standing orders—suspension
MR PRATT (Brindabella) (3.38): I move:
That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent Mr Pratt from making a statement.
Mr Speaker, what I would like to say in response to the Chief Minister’s call to me to table evidence by 6 o’clock today is this—
Members interjecting–
MR SPEAKER: Order! You have to speak to the motion to suspend standing orders and give reasons why.
MR PRATT: Mr Speaker, the reason I seek leave to suspend standing orders is to be given the opportunity to react to the Chief Minister’s challenge. If the government is not going to provide leave to me to make a reasonable response to the Chief Minister’s call, then clearly the government does not want to hear what I have got to say. Now, what I have got to say is a very, very clear statement in relation to the matter, and it is simply this: I do not have documentary evidence. The information that I have is by telephone call; it is very, very reliable information provided to me by an impeccable source, a senior official, and I do not intend to make that person—
MR SPEAKER: Come back to the motion.
MR PRATT: Therefore, I have no documentary evidence to table by 6 o’clock today. The information is verbal; it is from an impeccable source, and I stand by that source’s information.
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Minister for the Environment, Water and Climate Change, Minister for the Arts) (3.40): Mr Pratt has been going around the place telling the whole world that he had unimpeachable evidence of my complicity in a departmental decision. We now discover that the unimpeachable evidence is an anonymous telephone call—an anonymous telephone call.
MR SPEAKER: Order! We are not debating the issue. There has to be an attempt to connect this to the question that is before the house: that the standing orders be suspended.
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