Page 5994 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 8 December 2010
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MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (5.16): The Greens should read their own website. Under “Governance”, at line 7, it says that they want “open, accessible and transparent government with strong parliamentary oversight of executive powers”. I think the oversight has gone, and any indication that this is a strong move is just a joke. This is a damp squib of an amendment.
The Greens took the government at their word when Ms Gallagher set up the bullying review. We do not know what happened in the bullying review. We do not know what any of the recommendations are. It is a snow job. We have been told some of the process of implementing something that might have happened but we just do not know. That is not strong oversight of the executive.
What we are having today is again the Greens squibbing it, performing their role as trained patsies for the government, because they do not have the courage to stand up and say, “This is such a serious issue that we will do something about it.”
Ms Burch put it into a nice perspective during question time when she said, “The last time we had an inquiry, it was the result of a death.” Is that the standard that we now set ourselves for having an independent inquiry of this nature—that somebody has to die before we as an Assembly act? That is on the heads of the Greens and that is on the heads of the Labor Party—that the only way you get a judicial inquiry from here on in, the new standard, is a death. It will be a very sad day if that is the catalyst for the next judicial inquiry. Independent inquiries of this nature should be there to stop things like a death in custody or the death of a staff member.
Ms Hunter says enough words about bureaucracy—the bureaucratese: we need this; we need that; we need a path forward. And on it goes. But when she is held to account, as a salve to her conscience she uses the words “don’t blow it up into a circus”. By all accounts, Bimberi is a very sad circus. It has a litany of failures. There have been a string of assaults. We heard from the minister today: “It has never been brought to my attention.” Minister, why don’t you ask? What goes on in your organisations?
One of the rules I had as minister for transport was that whenever there was a fatality I got a phone call. I said, “I do not care what time it is, day or night, I want a phone call.” That is because, as a consequence of a motor vehicle crash, one of my officers would go out and view the site. They would see the dead person in situ so that they could determine the factors that led to their death. I said: “If one of my staff has seen that, I want to know, and I want to know that that person is being cared for, because they are my staff as the minister. I am responsible in this place for those staff.”
What we do today by not having a fully independent inquiry under the Inquiries Act is betray those staff who have spoken up, who have sent emails to many of us—government and opposition; I assume the crossbench got them as well—talking about racism, bullying and assaults. They are not the words of a circus, Ms Hunter. You might want to salve your own conscience by saying, “Oh, you’re just blowing it up into a circus,” but when people approach us we take our job seriously. When you hear that a staff member had his hands on the throat of a resident at Bimberi, and left marks there and broke capillaries in his eyes, that is a serious thing. When allegations
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