Page 4 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 14 February 2012
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MR SPEAKER: Order! Let us keep the tone of this, thank you.
MR HARGREAVES: Mr Speaker, they shall not rattle me. They can try but it will not work. I am very concerned that the transparency and accountability are absolutely missing from this. We need to be assured that those records are a true reflection of what happened in terms of attendance and performance of duties in that period of time.
I have to confess, Mr Speaker, that I cannot remember what my middle-level office staff did in the way of their attendance 12 months ago. I could not tell you. If you named a date, I could not tell you what time they came to work and what time they went home. So I would like to know how it is that not only does the staff member remember it but how it is that the member—not the chief of staff, I would suggest, but the member—would know. If he has a staff of 10, how would he know that those attendance records were correct? I do not know; it mystifies me.
There are some other questions that came to my mind which need answering and that I am sure the community want to know about. I would like to know: is the Assembly precinct the designated workplace of staff members? If it is a designated workplace then section E8 of the enterprise agreement kicks in here, where people require an approval to work off site for such things as home-based work.
I would like to know whether such approval actually applies to the opposition’s director of electorate services, who is predominantly employed across the road at level 5, 221 London Circuit, and has been there for in excess of 12 months and is rarely seen in this precinct. If that is a legitimate thing, there needs to be written approval saying that that is okay. If that does exist, I would like to know whether or not there is a perceived conflict of interest where a staff member of a member here can be employed within the office of a political party and whether or not that is a payment by the taxpayer of parliamentary funds for a staff member to work on a party political exercise. I would like to know that, Mr Speaker.
I would like to know whether or not the director of electorate services received any reimbursement for such things as telephone and whether there was a separation between his role as the president of the Canberra Liberals and that of the director of electorate services. I think the people of the ACT are entitled to know that.
I would like to know whether or not there were any other resources put across. For example, were there any computer services allowed to be provided in those offices? I would also like to know whether or not workers compensation applied to that particular staff member working off site. If not then that is a sad dereliction of responsibility from the member to his own staff member. I think that is appalling, if that is so. If it is not so, let it be seen to be not so.
Mr Speaker, we have got the motion here. I have put as much as I can by way of the questions in there, and I will not go into the detail of that, given the time. I am really concerned about the attitude. The community expects members in this place to transact their business according to the codes of conduct that we have here. Those freedom of information documents indicate a crystal-clear breach, in my view, of the members’ code of conduct.
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