Page 1058 - Week 03 - Thursday, 26 February 2009
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like this—if somebody in his office has given him the faulty advice and he has signed off on the brief and agreed to the faulty advice given to him—the buck stops with him. This minister made three illegal appointments and he wanted to just sneak them through. He hoped that people would not notice very much and would not ask very many questions.
It was interesting that the scrutiny of bills committee, for instance, when it first looked at this, did not look at the issue of validation of appointments. It was the justice and community safety committee, principally its secretary—the members should not take credit for this as it was the secretary of the justice and community safety committee—who raised with me that there were illegal appointments. We worked through this with the minister. He wrote to us. It was only after we published that documentation, that correspondence, that the scrutiny of bills committee advisers suddenly realised that we had a problem.
The minister hoped that this would go in under the radar—and it has not gone in under the radar. It will not go in under the radar. It will go on his record, which is a pretty appalling record: a serial misleader of the Assembly; someone who was castigated in the last sitting about his behaviour in making inappropriate comments; someone who bears around his neck the absolute catastrophe that is the AMC, the minister who was responsible for the construction all through the construction period, and when that will start we do not know. Now we have illegal appointments added to the catastrophe of the planning system, which was his baby as well. This is a man with not a very good record.
What I had proposed to the crossbenches and the government is that we should suspend standing orders and split out the validation legislation so that we had stand-alone validation legislation so that people of the ACT could see what was going on here. This is an attorney who has made a dreadful mistake, a fundamental mistake. He broke the law in doing so and he thought that he could skate in under the radar. There is no real justification; the only justification the attorney could have is to stand up and say, “I broke the law and I am sorry.”
But what we have got are quite mixed messages, because one of the Greens staff gave to me, on Tuesday I think, a copy of the departmental briefing that was written on 16 October to the minister and he made these appointments on 17 October, the day before the election. First of all, I would just like as an aside to point out the number of times that members of this place have asked for copies of briefings. When ministers have said that they were told X or Y or Z and we have asked to be shown the briefing to show what happened, they would say: “Oh, no, we can’t do that. This is executive privilege,” or, “These are privileged documents—you know, free and frank advice.”
But, when the minister wants to cover his reputation, suddenly this becomes available to me. One of the Greens staff came to me and said, “Mrs Dunne, here is a copy of the briefing and we have checked with the attorney’s office and it is all right for us to give this to you.” So suddenly, if it suits the attorney, if he wants to try and unsully his reputation, he will rely on the briefing which says that cabinet’s agreement to reappoint these members will expire when the new government is elected on 18 October.
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