Page 839 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 16 March 2010
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number of years, has persistently and wilfully not told the truth to this place and has been censured before. Based on the outcome of today—although the Greens will not be third-party insurance—I suspect he will be censured again for persistently and wilfully misleading the Assembly and, through the Assembly, the people of the ACT.
Madam Deputy Speaker, it is very serious. Forget the lines; forget the guff. The question is: when you told the Assembly something, was it true? Now, sometimes we inadvertently make mistakes and we come back and correct them. But this minister said, “No documents, no complaints.” He came back in and compounded that by making the same excuse in late February, and he comes back into this place today when being held to account by the opposition—not by the Greens, clearly—and he compounds it again by persistently and wilfully making the same case that he has not misled. In doing so, again he misleads the Assembly. The problem for the Assembly is that the Greens will not honour their agreement to hold the government to account. (Time expired.)
MR HANSON (Molonglo) (11.22): What is crystal clear is that Simon Corbell, as a minister, has come into this place and wilfully and persistently misled the Assembly. There can be no question of that. Mr Corbell and Mr Rattenbury are trying to distract from the issue by centring their debate on the conduct of the scheme. The conduct of the scheme in itself is indefensible but that is not the issue that is being discussed today before the Assembly. It is an important motion about a minister misleading the Assembly. Although you may wish to come in here and talk about the merits of the scheme or the failings of the scheme—and I think it is clear to everybody in Australia now that this is an incredibly flawed scheme—that is not the issue that is for debate today. It is a very clear issue: did Simon Corbell mislead the Assembly?
Let me quote again from the Hansard in relation to the question that was asked of the minister. It was clarified on a number of occasions, in this case by me. Mrs Dunne asked:
Minister, can you and your cabinet colleagues table any and all documents relating to the commonwealth government’s home insulation program …
Mr Corbell, in answering that question, refused to acknowledge that question that had been asked by Mrs Dunne; he refused to acknowledge that he would table those documents. I then had to stand up on two points of order to clarify the issue. On the first occasion I said:
Mr Speaker, the question was very specific. It related to the tabling of a document—this document and all other documents.
That was the first point of order. In the second point of order I said:
… the question that was asked by the member was very specific, about the tabling of this and all other documents related to the home insulation program.
For the minister to say that the opposition were not clear enough—Mrs Dunne had asked it in her initial question and then on two points of order I had clarified the issue. It was about all and any documents. He had this question asked of him three times and the point of order had been clarified by the Speaker. There was no question about
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