Page 1059 - Week 03 - Thursday, 26 February 2009
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There was plenty of opportunity for him to do a range of things. My understanding from the briefing was that the cabinet decided to appoint these people some time before this briefing was written, some considerable time before this was written. They could have appointed them earlier than this and written to the JACS committee. I notice in the attorney’s letter to the scrutiny of bills committee that he contends that the JACS committee had disbanded. That is not the case; the committees continued to exist until midnight on 17 October.
At any time between when the cabinet made the decision and 17 October, he could have consulted with these people. He could have said: “This is urgent. Can you turn it around quicker if that is possible.” Madam Deputy Speaker, I know that you and I and Mr Gentleman had discussions about what business we might transact on the planning and environment committee during the caretaker period and we did discuss the possibility of statutory appointments. I understand that other committees were approached and had to do statutory appointments. Various committees adopted various approaches. Some agreed to them; others said, “As we are in the caretaker period, we will make a short-term appointment that does not require our consultation and come back to the new committee with a longer appointment after the election.”
These were the courses of action open to this minister and his department. That his department and this minister collectively did not take any of the legal options is an indictment on the Attorney-General and the way he runs his department—nothing else. It is a sorry indictment of all of them—the fact that they thought, “Oh, well, it is the day before the election; we will just do it this way.” Senior people whose reputation and whose experience I regard highly have advised the minister to carry out an illegal action. I am deeply saddened that people whose work I have seen over a number of years could act in this way. This is a serious lapse on the part of a number of people across the department and in the minister’s office, right up to the minister himself.
We need to make it perfectly clear that what happened and what we are doing today in validating the Liquor Licensing Board and the Residential Tenancies Tribunal appointments is retrospectively making an illegal act legal. That is what we are doing. The other thing that we are doing is trying to rescue the reputations of people who are named in this legislation. That is the really terrible thing about this: three upstanding Canberra individuals are named here, not through their own fault. Nothing that they did was wrong; they had been carrying out their business. But we have validating legislation for these people because of what this attorney allowed to happen. He should write to those three people individually and apologise to them for the way that they have been inconvenienced, because the simple reading of it and the way that this was done, putting it in under the radar, implies that they may have done something wrong, and they have not. They have not done a thing wrong.
The only person who has done anything wrong is the Attorney-General and the Attorney-General needs to apologise to the people named in this legislation for the inconvenience and the slur that might accrue to their reputation for his, at least, thoughtless actions. At least they are thoughtless actions. At the very least this is a stuff-up. The possibility that they just did not care whether they broke the law on the day before the election is very high. As a result of that, the preferred option of the
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