Page 5516 - Week 13 - Thursday, 17 November 2011
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to actually examine those witnesses. When you have Ms Le Couteur saying one thing and Ms Gallagher saying another thing, the reasonable thing would have been to call them as witnesses, to ask them further questions about their evidence and about what went on in that meeting.
For me, that is a critical part of what the committee have to look at, and in my opinion the committee failed in doing that. There seemed to be an absolute reluctance from the start to actually call witnesses and examine witnesses. Perhaps that is because it would have been embarrassing for Labor and Greens members to have that play out. But I think that those differing accounts are critical to this issue.
The other particularly embarrassing thing for Ms Bresnan is that it does come down to who you believe and, having not even bothered to cross-examine or call these witnesses, Ms Bresnan has decided that she agrees with and she believes Ms Gallagher. She believes Ms Gallagher over Ms Le Couteur, over her Greens colleague Ms Le Couteur.
Let us look at the overall process and then let us look at how it came to those differing accounts. We had a number of problems. We had the Chief Minister publicising the appointment of the newly proposed Auditor-General in a media release headed “New Auditor-General for ACT”. There was the delivery of a letter at about the same time, with the conclusion noting, “I would appreciate your favourable consideration of the nomination.” There was the inappropriate meeting between the Chief Minister and Ms Le Couteur, where the Chief Minister allegedly stated that Dr Cooper would be the new Auditor-General. And there was the approach by the Auditor-General to Ms Le Couteur on 31 May at an evening function, as well as media appearances by Dr Cooper.
All of this together led to an untenable position for the committee. When the precursor to this legislation was debated in this place, it was made clear that we did not want to have a confirmation-style hearing process for these appointments. The only way to avoid that is for the process to be properly followed. I repeat the point—and this is made clear, I think, through this process—that what Ms Gallagher did was unprecedented. No previous Chief Minister had followed a process like that. No previous Chief Minister had followed this flawed and poor process that the Chief Minister did in this case. And you have to ask the question: why? Why did she act in the way that she did?
As I said in my additional and dissenting comments, I gave particular weight to a couple of areas. One was—in fact, this was rejected by other members of the committee—that I gave weight to the fact that PAC itself felt it had been interfered with. If we are going to look at whether there has been a contempt due to interference with a committee doing its job, I would have thought that the majority views of that committee might be taken into account. And when I specifically moved a motion to endorse the statements of PAC, that was rejected.
Again, we saw Ms Bresnan and Mr Corbell rejecting PAC’s findings in relation to the fact that they felt they were interfered with. We did not bother to actually call them as witnesses to ask them why they particularly felt interfered with, to give them that
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