Page 4406 - Week 10 - Thursday, 22 September 2011
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
I want to remind Canberrans that if they wish to participate in future charity days they should take their unwanted goods to Tiny’s Green Shed and then shop there on the last Wednesday of each month. This is a great community initiative and I urge all Canberrans to support it.
ACT Greens—email
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (6.44): Members, late this afternoon I received a letter from the head of the ACT public service alerting me to the fact that an email for an ACT Greens party fundraising event had been circulated to government employees. It has since been explained to me that the email was sent from the ACT Greens office email address. I will be responding to Mr Cappie-Wood’s letter immediately, but it is obvious to me that such an occurrence also requires a full and immediate explanation in the Assembly.
I am in actual fact unaware of how widely this email has been circulated inside the ACT government, but I am embarrassed that it has been circulated at all. Circulation of an invitation to a party political event to ACT public servants is highly inappropriate. However, as is often the case, such an occurrence has come about through an administrative error. Nevertheless, on behalf of the ACT Greens I would like to unreservedly apologise.
I would like to explain how this has come about, from the investigation that I have been able to undertake since it came to my attention late this afternoon. Firstly, a list of ACT businesses was being composed by a volunteer in the office of the ACT Greens to send invitations to a party fundraising event. The volunteer was apparently unaware of who InTACT was and mistakenly took them for a local IT company. Because the volunteer had no email address for this company, they Googled it, and under a heading of “Contact us” on the Shared Services page they found the email address sharedservices@act.gov.au. At this point, I am going to have to note that I myself would have thought that it would have been clear that this email address was not that of a private IT firm in Canberra, but I am unable to offer an explanation of what was going through the mind of the person who found the email address.
Mr Cappie-Wood has rightly asked me to explain how widely the email was sent through the ACT government network. Unfortunately, that is one part of the story I will be unable to help him with, as from that point on I can only assume that any forwarding through the network must have occurred from someone at the other end of the Shared Services email address. Indeed, I am unclear as to how an external email user could utilise any ACT government global address lists. Any further forwarding through the ACT network is an issue for whoever manages that email account, and one which I am sure will be investigated further by Mr Cappie-Wood.
The email in question that was sent to the Shared Services address apparently had my name on it, albeit with the ACT Greens office email address, and obviously not any Assembly email address. That was a second clerical error. I am informed that the reason my name was there was that it was a leftover from the last time the ACT Greens’ Outlook used the group outbound email function. The email was not from me,
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video