Page 5 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 14 February 2012
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They also portend a breach of the enterprise agreement, which is subordinate to the LA(MS) Act. That needs to be cleared up. The Leader of the Opposition, the alternative Chief Minister of this territory, has these questions to answer. He needs to answer them, and he needs to answer them in the public arena and not dismiss these queries, these questions, in the public arena as trivial. Attendance records are not trivial. It is not a matter of saying: “Oh well, we’ve got them all done now, thank you very much. It took us 22 months to put them all together, but we’ve now got them all together, so the game’s over. Don’t worry about it anymore. Sorry about that.” To me, it is a bit like, say, stealing something from somebody, paying the money back and then saying: “Well, it’s all over. It’s okay now.” It does not work that way in the courts and it does not work like that out there in the court of public opinion either. There have to be some explanations about the period of 22 months. Let us have a bit of a look at that particular—
Opposition members interjecting—
MR SPEAKER: Order! One moment, Mr Hargreaves. Stop the clocks. Members, in a moment, members of the opposition are going to get up and speak, and I would like to be able to ensure that you are also heard in silence. You are going to make it much easier for me to do that if you do not interfere while Mr Hargreaves is speaking.
MR HARGREAVES: There are essentially three parts to consider. One of the concerns is that there is something awry about these attendance records. There is something in the middle that we do not know about. The idea that somebody has a photographic memory does not wash with me. I am sorry, Mr Speaker; it does not wash. I need to understand how it is that somebody can certify those records so long after the attendance was actually performed. I would like to know how that can happen.
I am concerned about the attitude of the Leader of the Opposition in dismissing these allegations—indeed, these questions—because that does not become him and it does not become this parliament. This parliament is supposed to be an example. As employers, we are supposed to set examples on how we manage our offices and how we manage our staff. If there is substance to these allegations and these concerns then it is a very sad story about the ability of the Leader of the Opposition to manage his office and manage his staff. And it does not take very much to consider whether or not he could manage the territory after that. I think that is what we need to know.
I am very concerned that there is the possibility—nay, the probability—that a member of the staff of the Leader of the Opposition has worked predominantly off site without approval, has in fact therefore drawn salary from the Legislative Assembly’s appropriations to be the president of the Canberra Liberals. In other words, the Canberra taxpayer is paying for somebody to manage a political party. I think that is a very serious issue, and probably one of the more serious ones in this series of queries that we have.
If in fact it is not so and the director of electorate services for the Leader of the Opposition is a regular attendee in the precinct, perhaps the Leader of the Opposition
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