Page 2484 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 17 June 2009
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is unfortunate, but not entirely surprising that the Greens would want to downgrade this censure to something less and I think that it reflects a lack of experience with the forms of the house. I think that the idea of admonishing, whilst it is a quaint, recherche sort of word, does not actually do anything substantive and it is not one of the forms of the house. Therefore, I think it is unfortunate that Ms Le Couteur has brought forward this amendment.
I assume that there would have been discussions in the committee that Ms Le Couteur would have been privy to about the implications for the committee system. I hope there were discussions about the implications of the committee system if members steadfastly refused to attend when asked to do so by a chairman of the committee. It is unusual, Mr Speaker, for this to happen, that a chairman of the committee has to request a member to come, and it is highly unusual, I think unprecedented, that a member has refused to do so.
I think that, because this is the first occasion when a minister has refused to do so, we should take reasonably strong steps so that we actually set a reasonable standard for ourselves that we all have to live up to. I am concerned that the watering down of the censure motion to a motion of admonition—I am not quite sure where that terminology comes from—does not set a very high standard and means that it will be easier for members in this place to duck out of hearings when they are summoned in the future. I think that this is unfortunate.
I was most interested to hear some of the rhetoric from the Chief Minister and the Deputy Chief Minister and also some of the interjections from the manager of government business, who has not covered himself in glory this week, who said that it is for the government to decide who represents it at committees.
Mr Corbell: According to Vicki Dunne.
MRS DUNNE: I am sorry. It is not actually for the government to decide who attends; it is for the committee. The committee does not ask the chairman to write to the government and say, “Could you send somebody along?” Under the standing orders the committee asks the chairman, and the chairman writes to a member. It is not for the government to decide whether or not that member may attend. It is not for the cabinet to decide. It is not for them to sit in a huddle around the tea table and decide who shall answer the summons of a committee of this place. It is for the member to decide of his own volition. If he refuses to come then he has to face this chamber.
That is what he is doing today. He is facing this chamber for his failure to follow a directive from the chairman of the committee. He may have had a whole lot of perfectly good reasons why he did not want to do it, but it does not matter. It is not about his ego. It does not matter what his views were. It was his job to come to the committee and put forward, perhaps, that he could not answer a particular question because of a set of circumstances. But he did not do that. He just refused to come.
Mr Barr said before that there was nothing that he could do or say that would sway this Assembly not to take some steps against him today. Actually there are things that
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