Page 450 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 23 February 2010
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That is critically important here:
Largely because we had not revealed the TOC …
So the argument seemed to be—and Mr Sullivan will have the opportunity to make his argument as to what he meant by that—that he did not give that information, that he gave what was effectively misleading information because they were not publicising it.
If you are asked a question in a committee about something you do not want to publicise—and often we have argy-bargy in committees with government agencies, with public servants, with ministers about what information should be revealed; we tend to take the view that there are only a small number of instances where information should not be given either publicly or in camera to the Assembly; there is often that debate—what we had here was, instead of saying, “I can’t tell you that, I don’t want to tell you that,” we could have then had the argument, the committee then could have made a decision whether it wanted to require that information. The committee was not given that opportunity.
The committee was not given that opportunity, because we were given misleading information. That is why this is serious. That is why, I think, Ms Bresnan has picked up the crux of this matter and why this is different to other cases where there appears to have been inadvertent misleading, which is then later corrected, hopefully at the first possible opportunity. Of course, when it is not corrected at the first possible opportunity, that becomes an issue in and of itself.
It is interesting that we do not have the Treasurer here to give her side of the story in terms of the second part of Mrs Dunne’s motion, because it was put to her in the committee last week—and I am not aware of any information subsequent to that coming back to the Assembly—in terms of what the Treasurer knew, when she was advised about this information. I put it to Ms Gallagher in the committee last week, and she said she would go and check it. I am not aware—I stand to be corrected—of any of that information being provided to the Assembly.
I think it would have been quite useful for Ms Gallagher to get up and say what did she know, when did she know it and was she satisfied that the Assembly, through the committee, had been given correct information all through. That was the question that was effectively taken on notice last week by Ms Gallagher, and she would have had the opportunity to have checked that by now and to have come back during this debate and put it on the record.
I would call on her to do that. I would call on Ms Gallagher to come back and give a full account of when she was advised and has she now checked the record, as I believe she undertook to do, to actually look into these matters, to look at whether or not information was given that was misleading, whether or not she became aware of that very soon after, because we understand that these board minutes went to Ms Gallagher on 22 May, I believe, a few days after the hearing.
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