Page 3707 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 26 August 2009
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Nowhere did Mr Doszpot at any stage say or suggest such a thing. The idea is absurd.
In fact, you need to go back to some of the motivation for this. We had a minister who was embarrassed by the fact that the shadow minister ran a campaign which was successful. He ran a campaign which was successful, which was to see non-government schools not excluded from the Shaddock review. That was the campaign that was run by Mr Doszpot; that was the campaign which the minister resisted.
He had to backflip eventually under pressure and, when that happened, his petty piece of revenge was to try to claim that Mr Doszpot was advocating something which he clearly was not advocating. It was wrong; it was false. The wording in that letter sent to non-government schools was incorrect; it was deliberately so.
There is a difference, is there not, when someone actually sits down, takes the time to draft a letter, thinks about the words, and they are totally false? And that is what this minister has done in this case. It is as clear as day. We see this in the ministerial code of conduct:
Ministers will treat other Members of the Legislative Assembly, members of the public and other officials honestly and fairly … In the discharge of his or her public duties, a Minister will not dishonestly or recklessly attack the reputation of any other person.
He has not acted honestly and fairly here. He has acted in a way which absolutely, deliberately misrepresents a statement, which absolutely makes a claim that is patently false, that has no evidence to back it up. And what we have from the Labor Party is: “No, that is okay; it is politics. We can say what we like.”
There is rough and tumble in politics but we need to draw a line at things that bear no relationship to the truth whatsoever. And that is what we have here. We can compare the statements—and I am sure Mr Smyth will touch on this—of Mr Barr in the media. It is a slightly different situation, when you take the time to write a letter and think it through versus a live radio interview. Sometimes people mis-speak or do not quite explain things as well as they would like.
We do see a pattern. On the issue of EPIC this minister was being questioned by Ross Solly. Ross Solly said to him:
You did reappoint five of the members, that is correct, but you told the two outgoing members, including EPIC Board Chairman Brian Acworth, not to bother reapplying.
Andrew Barr said:
No, that’s not correct.
When Mr Solly put it to him that he had spoken to Mr Acworth, yes, he acknowledged that what he had said was not correct. So we see this pattern: just say it and hope you can get away with it.
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