Page 2810 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 24 June 2009
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agencies and programs”. This is what I am sure the whole house is in furious agreement on. But my amendment seeks to add to that sentence the words “as expressed by the Latimer House Principles as adopted by the ACT Legislative Assembly”. The reason for putting that in there is to make it even clearer that an auditor-general is something that all Westminster systems have. This is not an ACT issue; this is an important thing for all legislative assemblies.
Then, too, we do not differ from Mr Seselja’s motion in paragraph (2)(a) “that the Auditor-General is held in high regard by the Assembly and the ACT community”. That is abundantly clear from the last couple of days. The outpouring of support in the Canberra Times has been truly remarkable, and I hope very heartening for the Auditor-General. I probably do not need to say much more because we have already spent two or three hours yesterday and today on the subject of how important the position is and what high regard we hold the Auditor-General in.
But paragraph (2)(b) of Mr Seselja’s motion we are not putting in. It talks about a number of statements that the Chief Minister has made on the subject of the Auditor-General. While we have no doubt that he has made these statements, there is really no particular point in repeating the statements. We need to look at going forward. What do we actually want the Assembly to do, rather than repeat Mr Stanhope’s statements?
Given that the standing order that says that the Assembly cannot increase budget items, we believe that the most important and relevant thing for us to say—and this is paragraph (4) of my amendment—is that the Assembly “calls on the ACT Government to ensure adequate funding for the Office of the Auditor-General, including the capacity to maintain the current level of performance audits”. We have all spoken about the importance of performance audits, and I am hopeful that we are all in agreement that there should be adequate funding for the Auditor-General. The performance audits she does at present are important and our amendment says that we would like to see the level of audits maintained.
I commend my amendment to the Assembly.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (10.43): We will not be supporting the amendment, and I would like to put a couple of things on record in relation to it.
Ms Le Couteur, in just speaking, has not actually given any substantive reasons why the Greens disagree with any parts of the original motion. It is a matter of emphasis, it would seem, and I think that it is very important in this place that, if two parties are going to from time to time work together to get outcomes, we are not simply handed amendments like this, with no consultation and with no basic rationale as to why the motion is being amended. If the Greens want to get outcomes with us from time to time, they will actually have to work with us and show us the courtesy of negotiating with us and putting reasons why they do not support us, rather than that they simply want to word things differently. They could have brought forward a motion on this issue if there was such a strong feeling. I am particularly disappointed at the way this has been handled. I do not think it will be a good way forward in the future for the
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