Page 2638 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 23 June 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
event in the way that he did—that he was going to use it for his party political benefit and invite his factional colleagues from the left of the Labor Party to come along to this launch. I think it may have been crashed by one on the right; I am not sure. I think one of the right candidates may have found out about it and just turned up. I am not sure that they got invited. Nonetheless, it did put Mr Phelan in a really difficult position. I think that was apparent when he was asked, “Were you advised ahead of time that you would be having photo ops with Labor candidates?” and he said, “No.”
I think this is a really poor reflection on our Attorney-General. The Attorney-General was prepared to put the chief of police in the ACT in such a position that he was in some way co-opted, against his will, it would seem, into being in this photo op and being part of this ALP launch.
There is a pattern of behaviour here, a disgraceful pattern of behaviour. They have set a new low bar. They no longer care about the ministerial code of conduct. They seem to have thrown that out of the window. And they are setting the bar so low, to the extent that the minister even endorsed the decision of the planning minister not to show up when called. That is the new Jon Stanhope standard of ministerial accountability. With regard to all the words in the ministerial code of conduct about respect for the institution of the Assembly, it is a matter of, “Well, don’t worry about that; if it’s inconvenient, don’t show up, thumb your nose at the Assembly, show contempt for the Assembly.”
We have got a pattern of politicising the public service, which has been commented on adversely by a senior public servant and, indeed, in a roundabout way, by the education minister, although his hands are far from clean on this issue. We see a consistent pattern of politicisation of the public service which does undermine confidence. I think it is particularly concerning when we see what the Attorney-General did, but also what the health minister did, in having no documentary evidence to back up such arrangements—not going through proper channels where we could have actually seen some sort of documentation to back this up. They have set a new low bar for the politicisation of the public service in the ACT.
They take our hardworking public servants and they politicise them for their own ends. This, unfortunately, is how the ACT executive operates now. They regard the ministerial code of conduct as really just words that they do not have to comply with—statements of principle that they may have once believed in but clearly they no longer believe in them now.
They believe in the politicisation of the public service for their own ends. They believe in a breakdown of process, a misuse of process. The health minister, in calling her chief executive and saying, “Could we arrange ALP advertising in the hospital,” knows that no other political party would have got that kind of treatment. They have set a new low bar for ministerial standards and ministerial accountability.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Convenor, ACT Greens) (10.38): The appropriation in this budget is reflecting the full-year impact of these additional resources and wage increases for existing staff. We would expect wage increases to be in line with the normal guidelines and the funds allocated. This, of course, is to
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .