Page 3208 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 16 August 2011
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pointed out to you how erroneous your position is, how incompatible it is with your position as the Speaker, you have not taken the opportunity to withdraw those comments. If a member of this place in the heat of battle calls someone a liar, they have to withdraw the comments. In a moment when you may have been put on the spot, you made injudicious comments. You have had ample opportunity to withdraw them, and you have failed to do so. In failing to do so, you reinforce time and again that you do not uphold the rule of law.
It was quite interesting in this place to hear the speeches by Mr Corbell, the leader of the house, and the Chief Minister. Mr Corbell and the Chief Minister essentially made speeches in favour of Mr Seselja’s motion. Everything they said was essentially in favour of Mr Seselja’s motion, but in making those speeches and then at the last minute drawing back and saying, “But we can’t actually support Mr Seselja’s motion,” they make the situation worse. They actually condone your actions, Mr Speaker, when they think that they are not doing so.
To say that they continue to have confidence in the capacity of the Speaker to perform the duties fairly and impartially is not the question. The question is: were the words that you used, Mr Speaker, in neither condemning nor condoning the actions of Greenpeace appropriate? Your continued action in not withdrawing the inference that it is all right to break the law, to break and enter and violently destroy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property, condones those actions and says again that it is all right not to uphold the rule of law in this place.
The Attorney-General, the first law officer, has just stood up and said: “It’s all right, because Shane’s our mate. It’s all right because we need the Greens to support us here.” Political expediency is essentially what this is about. Mr Seselja dwelt briefly on the London riots, and I was thinking about this last week when I was driving home from work and I heard an interview with Ms Luciana Berger, who is a Labour MP for Liverpool. The interviewer from PM asked her about this mindless violence—they are the interviewer’s words—the disenfranchisement of people and their attempt to gain a voice. Ms Luciana Berger MP said:
If people are intent on regaining power and voice then they should be carrying out legitimate protests to government.
She said she was an opposition MP and she would be happy to support anyone who would protest against what the new government was doing, and then she went on:
But attacking people’s property, attacking people’s businesses, attacking people’s homes is an attack on our community and there can never be any excuse for criminality which is what we’ve seen in the course of the past few nights.
Those same words could be used by any member of this place, including the Speaker, in relation to the attack of Greenpeace upon the CSIRO experiment, but we did not hear that. The Speaker—who is a current member of Greenpeace, I understand—could not bring himself to condemn the actions of violence and of breaking and entering.
The Labor Party here does not have the courage to stand up for one of its own, because if this motion were successful, it is most likely that Ms Porter or one of the
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