Page 3979 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 15 Sept 2009
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But, as usual, when the Chief Minister is taken to task on his decisions or lack of decisions, the finger pointing starts in earnest. This time the fickle finger of Stanhope pointed to a bipartisan committee, the Standing Committee on Public Accounts. He described this Legislative Assembly report on the government’s fleet management business as grubby nonsense. An ABC news report on 21 August 2008 was headlined “Assembly Rhodium report ‘grubby nonsense’”. I quote from this article:
The Standing Committee on Public Accounts has reviewed the Auditor-General’s damning report on Rhodium Asset Solutions which found there had been excessive and inappropriate spending by the company and poor management practices.
The bi-partisan committee has made a series of recommendations on transparency and governance of Government-owned corporations.
Mr Stanhope has slammed the committee for suggesting that the company’s shareholders (Mr Stanhope and his deputy Katy Gallagher) failed to uphold their responsibilities.
“This is a very sloppy report, it’s a grubby report and I don’t think it brings credit on anybody,” he said.
The article continues:
Mr Stanhope says he cannot explain why committee member Labor backbencher Karin MacDonald signed off on it.
“I would imagine that none of the members, except those that had some political motivation, understood the implications or effect. That’s all I can assume,” he said.
The article also quoted opposition leader Zed Seselja as saying:
Mr Stanhope is having a go at Ms MacDonald by calling the report grubby nonsense.
His own member signed off on a report which said that he and Katy Gallagher may not have completed with the Territory-owned Corporations Act and also makes a number of other findings in relation to the failure of the shareholders, being Jon Stanhope and Katy Gallagher …
As if all this finger pointing was not enough, Mr Stanhope then took on the media. Mr Stanhope’s chief of staff, Jeremy Lasek, who is a former WIN news director, confirmed to the Canberra Times that he had met with WIN management but he denied that he had placed pressure on WIN to temper its political coverage. He indicated that he spoke regularly with news directors and executives as part of his job. But, and perhaps this was coincidental, on this occasion the chief of staff at WIN news, Mr John Roe, was sacked and a political reporter was stood down after this particular discussion by the Chief Minister’s chief of staff.
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