Page 2495 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
which he did—
or to give evidence or information as a witness to the committee, the committee shall advise the Assembly, and not again request the Member to attend the committee.
Standing orders were followed. We have seen Mr Stanhope’s obsession with the standing orders. He rarely understands them. He does not quite understand them when he gets the opportunity to debate them. He tries to use frivolous points of order to try and get his point across because he is not quite sure of it and he does not use it in debate.
But 258 is very clear, and we followed that procedure. What the manager of government business was saying was: “You should have followed a different procedure; what you have done is wrong.” No. We followed the procedures put in place by this Assembly in supporting these standing orders. What we also did and what the committee also did was to recommend that action be taken. We made very strong findings saying that the minister had shown contempt for the committee. That is what has led us here today.
The other charge of the manager of opposition business, Mr Corbell, was that we did not do it soon enough. We followed a very good process. We had a report which made recommendations as a result of certain things happening. We gave the government the opportunity to read that. We did not hear anything from Mr Barr yesterday. We then gave him notice that we would be moving it.
We all recall—I recall—Mr Corbell moving a censure motion. We may have found out about it about five minutes before he moved it if we were lucky. There has not been that same courtesy shown. Apparently what Mr Corbell is arguing is that we should have shown Mr Barr the same lack of courtesy that Mr Corbell has, in the past, shown members on this side. We believe that it is reasonable, if you are going to move a censure motion against a member, that some notice be given, that they have the opportunity to consider it and to prepare their case. If the argument from the Labor Party now is that we should not do that in the future, we will have to reconsider that, but we believe it is reasonable. We would expect that courtesy, although it has been rarely granted by the Labor Party, particularly when they had the majority government. They did not give that courtesy but we do believe in that basic courtesy.
The fundamental issue here, though, is that he thumbed his nose at the Assembly and at the committee. Let us just get back to the heart of that. There are a lot of standing orders about powers to send for papers and people, summoning of witnesses and procedure when we summon a member. If Mr Stanhope is saying that they do not have to attend and there is no sanction for that, the whole basis of our committee system falls down. Following that to its logical conclusion, all ministers could say: “We don’t want to talk about the budget this year; we will not be showing up. You can read the budget papers; you can make your own recommendations. We will come back to it. We do not want to talk about anything else that a committee wants to talk about in its committee inquiry.”
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .