Page 2356 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 16 June 2009
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MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER: You said, “Stop the clock.” You can ask me to stop the clock or ask the person presiding to stop the clock, but you cannot ask the Clerk to stop the clock.
MR STANHOPE: My comment was addressed to you, Madam Assistant Speaker.
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER: I did not interpret it that way. If that was the case, I apologise. I make it clear to members that if members do want the clock stopped, they should ask the presiding officer rather than bleat it out to the clerks. It is not their call. I call Mr Stanhope.
MR STANHOPE: Thank you, Madam Assistant Speaker. I can assure you I understand the relationship between the executive and paid officials, unlike the Liberal Party and the Greens in this place.
The volume of work imposed on hardworking and apolitical public servants over recent days would be easier to stomach if the Liberals and the Lite Greens had not so comprehensively squandered the opportunity to use the estimates hearings, as I said, for their proper purpose; that is, actually to scrutinise the budget—the appropriation bill. The hearings were utterly consumed by politicking that could not be linked to the budget.
The second aspect of the debate which I will touch on is the duty of members outside executive government to live by the same standards of openness and accountability they demand of the government. One of the most important attributes, I would have thought, of anyone in public life ought to be a modicum of self-awareness, a capacity to identify one’s own temptation to disingenuousness and then to conquer it and a capacity to live by the same standards that you set for others.
But that is not how the Liberals in this place behave. They subvert open and accountable government by misusing information they receive, by abusing the freedom of information laws in order to deceive the public and trick the media by taking advantage of briefings by public servants in order to launch disgraceful personal attacks upon them, accusing them of lying and traducing their professionalism—all for the most venal and momentary gain.
Who can forget their puerile and personal attacks on the Under Treasurer in this place? Who can forget Mr Coe’s description of the sworn evidence of the director of the library service as laughable on the day that she gave evidence to the estimates committee? Her evidence was described by Mr Coe, a member of the estimates committee, as laughable.
It was a disgraceful attack, a fact that does not seem to register with those opposite because anyone is fair game. There is no shame. There is not even comprehension that shame ought to be felt. Even the head of ACT Health, one of the most senior and most respected ACT public servants, is fair game, as we saw this morning. He is dispensable—collateral damage as a result of the ceaseless manipulation and misuse of the principles of openness and accountability by the Liberal Party.
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