Page 5515 - Week 13 - Thursday, 17 November 2011
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committee, on my suggestion, wrote to people who had been possibly adversely mentioned in another member’s motion.
I am also concerned, based on Mr Seselja’s dissenting comments, that he has listed the approach by the nominee for Auditor-General to Ms Le Couteur in the list of issues that inappropriately impacted on the public accounts committee decision. Mr Seselja actually agreed with the finding of the committee on this matter and also to each of the report’s recommendations.
I believe that even Mr Seselja would have to agree that as chair I tried to work to agreement on the overall content of the report and the recommendations in particular, even though he obviously disagreed with two of the findings. It was disappointing that Mr Seselja voted against the whole of the report.
This has been a very difficult process. This is something I have not included in the report, but as chair it has been quite frustrating through this process to deal with comments from other members which have not been helpful while the committee was dealing with the issue at hand and also the behaviour of some members.
We have had a great deal of talk this week about respect. It is incumbent on all members to respect committee processes and other members. I state again that I took this matter extremely seriously. To have suggestions made that this was not the case, that I lack integrity, is frankly offensive and unsubstantiated. I commend the report to the Assembly.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (11.21): I will speak a little about the overall process and also my dissenting comments. Unfortunately, what we had here was a very poor process put in place by the Chief Minister in relation to the proposed appointment of the Auditor-General. I think that, unfortunately, that very poor process has been compounded by the way this committee process has been conducted.
Before I get into the detail, I would like to correct one of the terms; I think it is on page 2 of my additional and dissenting comments, where I refer to “PAC’s failure to condemn”. I was intending to refer to the privileges committee’s failure to condemn, so I correct that for the record.
It was a poor process that was compounded by a flawed, secret process in the privileges committee. I think that is the unfortunate thing. There was no-one on the committee who could actually claim that it was a good process that had been put in place by Ms Gallagher. Some words are used by the committee such as “unhelpful” and the like, and there was much debate about exactly what language to use. But I do not think anyone was arguing that this was well done. The argument became about how serious that lack of process, or that failure to follow a good process, was.
But this also—and I think this is where we see the sensitivity from Ms Bresnan—comes down very much to who you believe. In those circumstances, when we have two accounts of a conversation, one from Ms Le Couteur and one from Ms Gallagher, and they are giving differing accounts of the same conversation, I think that it is incumbent upon a committee that is seriously interested in getting to the bottom of it
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