Page 29 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 14 February 2012
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I wanted also to address a couple of things. I am not sure which member opposite actually made this point, but he said, “Now you’re saying, guys, that people can’t go and work with their member at the shopping centres, with constituents.” That is not what I said at all. That is a misrepresentation of what I said. What I said was that it is about where the work is predominantly done off site. It means that if you are doing work as representing a member off site these are episodic happenings. They are not five days of the working week. They are not from nine to five. They are episodic. That does not happen, on my understanding, in any one of the other offices. That needs to be cleared up.
In seeking the chamber’s support of this motion and the issues which will stem from it, I make this observation: the Leader of the Opposition stood up in his contribution and used the words “time sheets”. We use the term “attendance records”. They are interchangeable terms. He said: “I take responsibility for that. It is regrettable.” What responsibility? “There may have been, there may not have been, inappropriate payments. Well, sorry about that. There may have been payments made to the president of the Canberra Liberals instead of to the role of the director of electorate services. Well, sorry about that. There may have been no attendance records done for 22 months”—and as Ms Hunter pointed out, 14 months in one hit—“Well, sorry about that.”
Then, of course, we have got this certification for 14 months. Mr Smyth asks if we can honestly say whether our people were there when we were overseas. The short answer is yes, we can. We have diary entries sitting up there to see whether or not people are there or not. If we have the slightest doubt, we will access those log-on records ourselves. Do we? No, we do not. If the Auditor-General says there is something smelly here then it is incumbent upon the member to check it out. Not only did we find the Leader of the Opposition not checking it out when the flags went up from the Auditor-General but also we found he did not check it out when the Clerk repeatedly asked him to check it out. But what he could do—because this guy must have a photographic memory—was certify them as all correct.
Let me pose this: if, in fact, we find that there has been a claim made for attendance that was not official duty, that person is in breach and everybody will know that. But I argue that the person that certified it as correct is equally as guilty. That is something that we need an independent auditor to clarify. Mr Seselja says he takes responsibility for that. I want to see a little bit more responsibility accepted for that than “well, I’m sorry about that”. “Sorry about that” does not cut it with me.
We are talking about the alternative Chief Minister. The community expects the alternative Chief Minister to be like Caesar’s wife—not only to be doing the right thing but to be seen to be doing the right thing. There is smoke out there and there is a suspicion out there. Trying to flick it to a general audit, to hide behind it, is not going to cut it. To blame the Secretariat is not going to cut it. This is something that the Leader of the Opposition is under the spotlight for.
If the situation was reversed, those opposite would be hammering us from one week to the next. They would not just be getting an independent person in to check it out
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