Page 5578 - Week 13 - Thursday, 17 November 2011
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whether they know the person or not or whether they think the person can do the job or cannot do the job. For the record, I was the environment minister when Dr Cooper was appointed to the ACT public service and I have worked with her for a long time. It is not about that. I am sure it will be characterised as that, because that is the only defence those opposite will have. But it is about getting this right. It is about respect for the process, for PAC, for the position of auditor-general and, indeed, for the people of the ACT.
One of the other things raised was both the Chief Minister and the preferred candidate inappropriately approaching the chair. We all need to be careful about that conflict of interest. Committee members are often reminded that if they have a conflict of interest, they need to make it known to members. Indeed, Ms Le Couteur rightly stood aside when a Greens bill was referred to the public accounts committee because she had worked for a firm that was involved in the process. Regardless of whether she had a conflict of interest or not, to avoid the perception of a conflict of interest, she very generously stood aside, as was appropriate, so that there could be no taint of the process.
In this whole process Ms Le Couteur comes out of this very well, and I commend Ms Le Couteur as the chair of the public accounts committee for the way she has conducted this process. We had to go to unprecedented steps of writing to the Chief Minister for an extension of time, seeking an in-camera hearing and requesting more documents because we had doubts. That is all because of the poor process that followed. None of this would have happened if the Chief Minister had not set that flawed process in train.
The point then comes down to what happened when the Chief Minister approached the chair of PAC. When the committee called for submissions, I think initially there were about four submissions on the committee website. There are now about 11. Some of them are other members putting in their version and other people coming forward and saying, “Well, this happened to me,” or, “I believe this is what happened.” I have never seen the number of submissions grow like that. That indicates to me there is a problem as well. But none of those who put in a submission and offered to speak—Mr Hargreaves offered to speak to the committee, I offered to speak to the committee, I think the Chief Minister offered to speak to the committee—were invited to speak.
I am not sure what the committee was afraid of, but I know that, at the heart of this whole discussion about whether or not there was inappropriate influence, is the contradiction between the two statements from Ms Le Couteur and the Chief Minister. One said, “I apologised,” while the other said, “She came and told me Dr Cooper would be the Auditor-General.” That is undue influence, and that is inappropriate. I will conclude here. I will have further things to say, but I commend this motion to the Assembly.
MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Chief Minister, Minister for Health and Minister for Industrial Relations) (4.22): Mr Smyth started by saying that this disallowance motion was not about an individual. He then spent a large part of his speech, I think, casting doubt about the capacity of the Auditor-General to fulfil the responsibilities by
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