Page 3708 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 26 August 2009
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There is a difference. There is a difference between that live interview and this letter where there would have been premeditation, where the minister sat down and, no doubt in response to the fact that he had lost this battle with Mr Doszpot, decided that he was going to show him; and the way he was going to do it was to run a scare campaign, a baseless scare campaign, in the non-government school sector that there was some plan of the Liberal Party to take over non-government schooling, take control using the Human Rights Act.
What a load of rubbish! It was so unbelievable. There is no chance that he would have actually believed it when he wrote it but he was prepared to put pen to paper, he was prepared to put this in writing, for the basest of political motives, the absolute basest of political motives. We are saying, as an Assembly and as a party, this is unacceptable.
We do not accept Mr Corbell’s pathetic defence, which is, “It is just politics and therefore we can say what we like.” Politics is not an easy game but it does not mean we can completely throw the truth out the window. It is important that ministers are held to high standards. It is important particularly when they are corresponding as ministers with stakeholders.
It is reasonable—and in the future these actions by Mr Barr will undermine this relationship—that the very important relationship that stakeholders have with a minister is one based on trust; that, when they receive a letter from a minister, the minister for education, writing to non-government schools, they could rely on the words in that letter; that they would look at that and say, “The minister says it; so we believe it to be true.” No doubt that is how they would have seen it when they received this letter.
It does undermine trust; it does actually breach the very important standards by which we hold ministers to account in this place—the basic standards, as Ms Gallagher said in the debate last week on the MPI; commonsense standards; standards that, if they were not written down, we would expect to be complied with anyway, that ministers will act honestly and fairly when dealing with members of the public and when dealing with other members of this place.
The minister has breached this; he has breached the code of conduct; he has done it for the basest of political motives. We have seen it in a lot of areas from this government but this is a blatant example where the minister has been caught out. We believe he does deserve to be censured for this. To deliberately go out and mislead stakeholders in such an egregious way, we believe, warrants censure.
But we are prepared to support this amendment as certainly a strong statement from the Assembly that this kind of behaviour by ministers is unacceptable; that we as an Assembly will hold ministers to account for their actions, as is our role; and that we will not accept the line that is being put by Mr Corbell in defence, which is, “It is all just politics; this is acceptable; we should not worry ourselves with this.”
The minister has been caught out. He deserves to be censured and he certainly deserves a strong statement from this Assembly, which we will be getting once this
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