Page 709 - Week 02 - Thursday, 23 February 2012
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This is really what this is about. It is about the fact that the Labor Party will allow Mr Hargreaves to say and do anything until he is caught out being disloyal to his colleagues. It is, “Johnno, he is a larrikin.” You know, “Yes, he does have foot in mouth disease, but he is a good Labor man.” Do good Labor men spend their time badmouthing their colleagues?
That is what Mr Hargreaves does on a regular basis. He picks someone that he wants to be his friend on the other side and he has little confidential conversations with them—some of them not quite so confidential. The ones that stick in my mind are the times when Minister Gallagher was the Treasurer, the times he denigrated her performance as the Treasurer to me. His constant sniping about Mr Corbell and the comment that he made to me one day, which I am sure was in the hearing of Mr Barr, when he said, “When Andrew worked for me I taught him a lot of things, but I never managed to teach him loyalty.”
It was an extraordinary outburst from someone who was, in a sense, burnt by the factions. The bile and the retribution against Mr Barr, which we see in the note which was published in the Canberra Times today, come from the falling out in the factions when it came to a point where Mr Barr, as the leader of the faction, had Mr Hargreaves tapped and told that the faction would no longer support him as a minister.
That is what happened. The falling out stems from there at least, along with the intemperate words that have come from Mr Hargreaves about his colleagues that can be summed up by, “I have taught him a whole lot of things, but I never taught him loyalty.” The irony of that obviously never crossed Mr Hargreaves’s mind. The loyalty that he showed Mr Barr in writing the note that he passed to Mr Coe was extraordinary.
What we have here today is a litany of occasions where we have seen Mr Hargreaves behave in a way that is unfitting for a member of this Assembly. We have had his outbursts last week. We have had his feigned apology yesterday, when in his qualified apology he actually went on to criticise members of the Tuggeranong community again. And then we have this latest element.
The question has to stand: how long would Ms Gallagher, Mr Barr and the rest of the Labor Party allow John Hargreaves to continue on his “larrikin way”—I use it with inverted commas—his “larrikin way”, his foot in mouth way, before they would have pulled him up? Is it the fact that they have only pulled him up because he was found out? Is it because he was caught out attacking one of their own?
His performance, which has been passed off as his “larrikin way”, his disrespect for the people of the ACT, his disrespect for his colleagues, his disloyalty to his colleagues—all of these things show that this is a man who is unfit to serve and to hold an office in this place. In a sense, to be an Assistant Speaker, although it is not a remunerated position—and Mr Hargreaves made that point—makes him a standard bearer for this Assembly. The person who occupies the Speaker’s chair has to have some sense of gravitas and has to have some sense of being fair-minded.
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