Page 4009 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 20 September 2011
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approach.” Why? Because she obviously had some sort of concern about that.
When you get to Mr Corbell’s case you get the ridicule. We expect that from Mr Corbell. When he cannot debate an issue on the issues, you go the ridicule line. The point is this: the committee, the majority of the committee, said they had concerns. On the two issues you asked about, Mr Speaker, they found, yes, there was attempted influence in both; could not work out whether it was substantial in the first but did agree that, in the second case, if regarded as a precedent and repeated, it would cause substantial interference with the scrutiny and oversight roles parliamentary committees have on behalf of the Assembly. That is the nub of what we are discussing today.
It does not matter whether it was one influence, whether it was one press release, whether it was one word—it should never happen. If you want a full debate on the whole issue of statutory privilege, let us have that debate. But this is why governments in the past have not made these appointments public, so that the committees could do their jobs without any influence at all, whether serious or not. It is to allow the committees—which are a vital part of a unicameral system—to do their jobs without any interference at all.
Again, I refer to the tone of the press release. It starts with “New Auditor-General for the ACT”. If anybody read that, they would assume that is an appointment. Let us face it, a lot of people read the headlines and go, “Okay, we’ve got a new Auditor-General,” and they just move on. The whole point is that this is the first time this has happened. At the end of the press release is the assumption that the public accounts committee is simply a rubber stamp because the nomination has been made.
I had serious concerns over the process followed by the government in relation to the appointment of the new Auditor-General, in the governance of the whole issue and the process that was followed. That led me to write to you, Mr Speaker, and I thank you for determining that the matter does have precedence over other business. It is interesting that, upon becoming the Chief Minister, Ms Gallagher promised a new era of openness and accountability. But this is the only appointment in that time that has been made public.
One of her first actions was to move away from the established process for dealing with statutory appointments, a process about which I am not aware of any complaint. I have been on committees that sent appointments back to government and asked for additional information, and I have been on committees that have questioned the process, but it has always been done in the privacy of the committee so as not to, in a way, embarrass the government by facing rejection of their nominee and also not to embarrass the individual who might have thought they were about to be appointed to something to find they had been rejected. If we want people to come forward to be nominees for government positions, then they deserve to be given that courtesy. Indeed, this has probably caused the new Auditor-General a great amount of discomfort as well.
We have supposedly got this new era of openness and accountability, but it was done at the expense of the committee system, and that is unacceptable. One of her first
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