Page 895 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 29 March 2011
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When I first started in the public service an awfully long time ago, auditors were in two breeds. One of them had a green pen—they were the internal auditors—and then there were the purple pen wielding commonwealth auditors. Both of them were scary individuals. In fact, for Mr Smyth’s benefit, one of them was also an AFL umpire. Now how bad is that? My God!
The thing was that they used to come in and check the figures and they would frighten the daylights out of everybody. But there was no way in which they were to offer assistance in ways forward. Nowadays we have changed. We certainly have to do that accounting check but we also have to have systems checks and performance checks and we are now an outcome driven society. So the whole mindset of audit has changed. I think there has been an evolution, and assistance in that evolution, over the time that I have known Tu Pham and the office going forward.
I would like at this point to also acknowledge Bernie and Rod in the gallery. They have been of great assistance to Tu. All three of them have brought an essence to audit that I did not really know existed until I met them—that is, they have a sense of humour. I thought that, once you became an auditor, you had to go to hospital and have your sense of humour taken away. But such is not the case. We have had quite a number of laughs along the way, and I thank them very much for that.
In terms of the success of a statutory officer, one of the measures is in fact the degree to which your staff hold you in great affection. I know that in some cases people are so professional that they lose sight of the human part of the organisation that they head up, and you can then measure whether that has been good or bad by the degree to which they are held in affection by their staff. I think that Tu Pham enjoys the very deep affection of her staff and that is a really pleasant thing to watch.
As Mr Smyth said, the family support needs to be acknowledged. The family support is two-way. When you get to a high-powered or high-pressure job that takes up a lot of time, the families put themselves out quite a lot just to support us. We in this place know only too well about that, so I think it is appropriate that we pay tribute to Tu’s family. Also, I would like to mention the other street. Tu Pham’s pride in her family, in the achievements of her children, is obvious. Her eyes actually get moist when she starts talking about the success of her children. Also, I know that she recognises and applauds the support that her husband has given her. And we do not see that until somebody leaves. So I would like to put on the record how much we appreciate the support that Tu’s husband has given her along the way.
I have no sympathy for the Auditor-General in her retirement because she now has to learn how to cook properly. She has been watered and fed along the way by a very industrious husband and now the tables have turned. I have a Vietnamese cookbook that I got in Hanoi that I am quite happy to lend to the retiring Auditor-General, should she want to avail herself of it.
One of the biggest and most important contributions that Tu Pham has made has been to show the young women of this city just what can be achieved with a bit of hard work and some education. We have been trying to encourage young women to the
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