Page 596 - Week 02 - Thursday, 6 March 2008
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MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Corbell—
MR CORBELL:—I withdraw that—
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Corbell, not only will I now ask you a second time to withdraw that, but I hereby warn you, Mr Corbell. Mr Corbell, you have the floor.
MR CORBELL: Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I withdraw any inference of offence. The bottom line is that the government believes that such significant changes as outlined by the Liberal Party should have been dealt with during the substantive course of the committee’s inquiry into the standing orders. The government does not support a last-minute attempt to change these matters. The government supports the resolutions of this cross-party committee in full. We will be voting to endorse the recommendations of the committee in full, but we will not be supporting the proposals put forward by either of the Liberal Party’s spokespeople on these matters—that is, Mr Smyth or Mrs Dunne. (Time expired.)
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (11.44): Mr Deputy Speaker. I will be speaking to the amendment; I am not closing the debate as the original mover. Mr Corbell is just wrong. Mr Corbell quotes from the document that Mrs Dunne was not at the meeting. But, of course, in his usual way, Mr Corbell just twists things. He did not read the full sentence, which is:
A roundtable discussion of MLAs was held on Tuesday, 26 September 2006. At that meeting the committee, along with …
At that stage, Mrs Dunne was a member of the committee, so Mrs Dunne was at the meeting. That is the first problem for Mr Corbell. The second problem for Mr Corbell is that he has taken advice from Ms MacDonald on what actually happened in the committee. That is curious, because perhaps the least productive person on the committee was Ms MacDonald, who had very few amendments to make and who said very little to the committee through that whole process.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Smyth, a little less on the personal. Let us stick to the substance of the debate.
MR SMYTH: This is the substance. Mr Corbell has relied on Ms MacDonald’s recollection. Now the interesting thing is that at that meeting on 26 September that Mr Corbell mentioned, the roundtable, submissions were discussed. One of the submissions considered was the submission from the Committee Office of the Legislative Assembly for the Australian Capital Territory. What does the Committee Office recommend, Mr Deputy Speaker? I notice Mr Corbell has fled the chamber, as is his wont. He has dug a big hole and now he is hiding out. Paragraph 12 of the submission states:
As a threshold issue, the Assembly may wish to consider whether it wants to establish a “core committee system”, ie those committees which have been established in some form in every Assembly, set out in Standing Orders …
It goes on to name them. It continues:
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