Page 4349 - Week 10 - Thursday, 22 September 2011
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MR SPEAKER: Chief Minister, I ask you to withdraw the—
MS GALLAGHER: I will withdraw. I honestly did not believe that “slippery” was unparliamentary, but my colleagues tell me it is. So most certainly I do withdraw.
Mr Seselja: Point of order, Mr Speaker.
MR SPEAKER: Order! Stop the clocks, thank you.
Mr Seselja: One of the Greens—I believe it was Ms Hunter—said that actually Mr Smyth is slimy. I ask that that be withdrawn.
Ms Hunter: No, I did not. I said “slippery”—maybe slimy, but I did not think slippery.
Members interjecting—
MR SPEAKER: Order! Ms Hunter, could you withdraw the comment.
Ms Hunter: Certainly, Mr Speaker.
MR SPEAKER: Ms Gallagher, you have the floor.
MS GALLAGHER: Thank you, Mr Speaker. On 2CC, he was again perpetuating the line that I have already been found guilty of interference in the appointment—in Mr Smyth’s own words, “interference in the appointment of one of the most important statutory positions in the territory”—when just the day before Mr Smyth’s own motion posed that question to the Assembly.
That is the problem with this, Mr Smyth. I am not sensitive about the privileges committee. I look forward to having the opportunity to talk with members of the privileges committee about what occurred throughout the appointment of the new Auditor-General. I stand ready for that. But in that process I do want to be accorded the right to have a fair process. At the moment we have one member of the opposition out there with a predetermined view—and we accept that—peddling the view that the committee of the Assembly, established with this question in front of them, has already come to this conclusion. That is the problem, Mr Smyth. You got too far ahead of yourself and you need to be brought back.
All we are asking through this motion—and we are censuring you for your behaviour—is that you restrain yourself and allow a fair process to occur. That is simply what this motion does today. Without it, I have no doubt that you, and perhaps your colleagues, over the next six to eight weeks that this committee will be doing its work, would continue to go out and perpetuate these highly defamatory comments.
MR HANSON (Molonglo) (3.36): What a patronising speech from the Chief Minister, indicating like some patronising schoolmarm that she is on the moral high ground here. She is trying to pretend that this is anything other than an entirely concocted,
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