Page 5223 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 18 November 2009
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was forced to sack a public servant from the board that he wanted to be filled with public servants. Unfortunately, the minister also chose to sack one of the women on the board, hence a change in the ratio of women on the board and probably in contravention of the government’s stated policy. The facts of this mistake are revealed by the minister’s true agenda all along.
As I said, he failed to abolish the board. He was thwarted by the Liberal Party and the crossbench and as a result of that he became petulant, and when you are petulant and you stamp your feet too much, you do not think very clearly—and that is when you make mistakes. It does seem to affect your ability to count and it is not a big number; you did not have to take your shoes and socks off or anything like that. He had to count to nine and he could not get it right. That aside, the epic blunder that resulted in the dumping of Ms Clarke is only a sideline on this issue.
This is all about the ego of the minister. The minister could not get his way. He tried to circumvent that, and there are good reasons why we are here today, fixing up his mistake. We are here today because we believe that when we have an organisation such as EPIC, a territory-owned corporation, there should be a level of independence between that corporation and the bureaucracy. There are good reasons for that: corporation law would require it to be so because if you have too many members of the bureaucracy on the board it opens to question whether the board is truly independent of government, and the board is supposed to be truly independent of government.
It was interesting in another context to hear the Chief Minister defend the independent board structure that we have at Actew and say why we have an independent board structure at Actew—so they can make decisions independent of government. The Chief Minister gave a very good exposition about why you have independent boards. This Assembly decided that it wanted an independent board for EPIC and essentially agreed with the Chief Minister’s exposition on why you should have an independent board. But what happened was of course that the petulant minister went round, behind people’s backs, presumably in the dead of night. Obviously, he must not have had a good enough torch under the blankets when he was furtively putting together these instruments; otherwise he would have been able to realise that he needed to count to nine.
What we seek in Mr Smyth’s bill is to re-establish the original context of the whole process of why we have territory-owned corporations in the ACT: to ensure independence of the board; to ensure that ownership is separate from management; to ensure that the board of the TOC is responsible for accountable outcomes; to ensure that the structure and operation of the territory-owned corporation will result in a successful business model and operate effectively; and, most importantly, to ensure that board members are appointed having regard to their commercial and other expertise in the strategic management of the TOC.
We have no evidence that any of those things were taken into account when Mr Barr made his appointments. What we have to do here is, unfortunately, unmake those appointments. We need to make it clear that, in unmaking those appointments, we make no reflection upon the people who have been put in this position, in this
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