Page 4334 - Week 10 - Thursday, 22 September 2011
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MR SPEAKER: Mrs Dunne, I always strive to be consistent in my rulings. Having now sat through a number of dissent motions, no confidence motions and censure debates in this chamber, I think that Mr Barr’s comments at this point are well within the boundaries that have been set by members in this place in the course of those debates. Mr Barr, you have the floor.
MR BARR: Thank you, Mr Speaker. So given the Deputy Leader of the Opposition’s reputation for seeking to smear his political opponents, one is tempted to believe that he is aware of his actions in this instance and that he simply does not care. But either way, he must be called to account today. He must be made to see that there are principles that are more important than his desire to wound or defame his political opponents—principles like decency, like a respect for the facts and the truth, and like fairness.
The Deputy Leader of the Opposition is very fond of extracting a line or a phrase from a document and then coming into this place and shrilly claiming that it means X or Y when, in fact, a full reading of the document would show something completely different. And contrary to his repeated and public assertions, the Chief Minister has not been found to have acted improperly. She has simply been accused by Mr Smyth of doing so. But the whole point of a select committee is to examine his allegations.
If there was no need for this process, perhaps we could simply tune in to “Trial by 2CC”, with his honour Brendan Smyth QC at the stand. But in the Assembly on Tuesday of this week, Mr Speaker, you made it clear that your role in determining whether or not to establish a select committee was not to judge whether there had been a breach of privilege by the Chief Minister but simply to judge whether the accusation put forward by Mr Smyth merited precedence. You found that it did and, accordingly, the Assembly established a select committee. I have obviously reiterated the government’s position in relation to that, but it is important to note that this is a very different thing from finding anything amiss in the actions of the Chief Minister.
The Deputy Leader of the Opposition has brought today’s censure motion upon himself. He has done so because he has taken affront at something and then, because of the size of his own ego, he has inflated it out of all importance, imagining motives where no such motives existed, imagining skulduggery, puffing himself up as some sort of champion of process, even though he then goes out and subverts that very process.
Unlike the members of the opposition, the members of the government regard a censure motion as a motion of weight and significance. We do not move this motion against Mr Smyth lightly or take pleasure in doing so. But we simply believe that he must be made to know that his behaviour is not of the standard expected of MLAs.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (2.51): That was quite amazing. There is a motion censuring me for what I said in a press release on Tuesday, yet not once did the minister quote from the press release. Not once did he point out a single fact to back up his argument. If the press release is so offensive, would you not have quoted the offensive portions from the press release? Of course you would.
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