Page 2756 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 23 June 2009
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MR RATTENBURY: Yes. Thank you, Mrs Dunne, for that clarification. You obviously did well at maths. One-sixth of the $100 million “we’re going to tackle climate change” expenditure is going on a project that barely even rates when it comes to carbon sequestration.
Let us stop making a joke of the arboretum. Let us get serious about climate change. I hope that by next time, when we come around to next year’s budget, we will not see this same sort of spin doctoring going on and the people down at Chief Minister’s will have found some better projects to spend climate change money on. Maybe they will have given up on climate change and at least given it to the department where there might be some people with some expertise, because clearly Chief Minister’s is about spinning this, not about taking real action.
I find it singularly bizarre that the government could only note this. That they could not simply agree that next year they were not going to try and put this same spin across the table is really unfortunate. I hope that over the next couple of years—certainly the Greens are pushing hard for this—we can see a more real account of what the government is doing on climate change.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (8.13): There are a number of elements in the Chief Minister’s portfolio that I need to address tonight. We have to go back to the important issues in the Chief Minister’s portfolio as the principal agency, in the sense of being the primus inter pares, the most important agency—about the example that we see in Chief Minister’s. We have seen, and Mr Seselja and Mr Smyth have touched on this already, the Chief Minister’s spac attack over unfortunate headlines in the Canberra Times that resulted in an 8.30 in the morning email off to the Land Development Agency to put in an ad and write a letter to the editor attacking the opposition and the Canberra Times.
Having been a staffer for quite a number of years, I know how these protocols work. I worked in the government and I worked on the other side as a public servant in the commonwealth for a number of years. As a public servant, I was often asked to draft a speech or to draft a letter to the editor. It was quite clear whether I was being asked to do it or I was asking to do it as a staffer. You actually ask the agency for the facts. It was often said, “Don’t you worry about the spin; we will do the spin. We will put the political slant on it. That’s our job; it is not the job of the public service.” It is entirely inappropriate for public servants to be asked to draft a letter to the editor that attacks the opposition or that attacks the principal journal in this town for something that the Chief Minister does not like.
The Chief Minister does not understand that he is the chief politiciser of public servants in this town. His performance is appalling. He shows no remorse and no regret and gives no indication that he will not do it again in the future when he sees the Canberra Times over the breakfast table, he does not like it and he chokes on his weeties. The next thing we will find is another splenetic missive off to some poor unfortunate public servant who will be told, “Do a job on the opposition and the Canberra Times.” It is perfectly reasonable for the Chief Minister to do a job on the opposition in the Canberra Times if he wants to, but it is not reasonable to ask the
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