Page 2829 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 24 June 2009
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This amendment is worthless because the Chief Minister laughed at it. He laughed at it in this place. That is how he behaves. People do not hold him to account, because people do not stand up to him and say, “It’s unacceptable to verbal the Auditor-General. It’s unacceptable to threaten her. It’s unacceptable to treat her in this way.” I think it is unacceptable to take these quotes out of the motion.
The quotes are just some of the quotes over the last eight years that we have heard when the Chief Minister does not get his way. The quotes are just some of the way he behaves. The quotes are some of the disdain with which he treats people who want to hold him to account. And if this motion is amended today, then he has got away with it again. He has already told you he is going to weasel out of it. He is going to walk away from the commitment. He is not going to honour it. He treats you with the same contempt. You let him get away with it and you need to answer it.
We will stand up for the Auditor-General, as we always have. She deserves to be independent. She deserves to be treated with the respect that the office is due. She deserves to have your support, Chief Minister, and she does not. (Time expired.)
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (11.39): I thank members for their contributions to the debate.
Mr Stanhope: That is all right.
MR SESELJA: Except Mr Stanhope, whose contribution was ridiculous. I point out again Mr Stanhope’s comments in today’s paper. You can never quite tell with Jon Stanhope whether he does not understand or whether he is pretending not to understand, and there is often a mix of the two. He said, “Every agency and department could argue that to maintain independence from the executive, the Assembly should set its budget.” It is ridiculous to compare the Auditor-General with other agencies, to compare the Auditor-General with the department of education, the department of health, with the Department of Justice and Community Safety. It is a ridiculous misunderstanding of the role of the Auditor-General.
The Auditor-General does not answer to the minister. The Auditor-General reports to the Assembly about the activity of government and looks to scrutinise the government and hold it to account. The Auditor-General is not part of the government in the way that a department is part of the government. That is the fundamental point, and this attempt to muddy the waters in today’s Canberra Times, which appears to have been accepted by Ms Hunter is, I think, just a reflection either of Jon Stanhope’s misunderstanding or of his attempt to mislead the community on what this actually is and what this actually means.
There is nothing that the Greens have said—and we have heard only one speaker from the Greens—that actually refutes anything that is in the original motion. There is nothing that says which part of it they do not agree with, and I am particularly interested in the fact that Ms Le Couteur’s proposed amendment actually takes out reference to the recommendation from the estimates committee. The estimates committee made this recommendation and apparently the Greens are not standing by it, even though they signed off on it in the committee.
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