Page 949 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 20 March 2012
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It is unacceptable behaviour. It is a bit unprecedented today. We have the Speaker being put in a position where he has to counsel Mr Hargreaves. He has to actually counsel an Assistant Speaker for their behaviour in the chair. I do not recall that happening in the past. I would think that that would be rare. If it had ever happened, it would be an extraordinarily rare occurrence.
In acknowledging that the behaviour was unacceptable, in acknowledging, Mr Speaker, that you had to counsel Mr Hargreaves for his behaviour, even you were a little bit embarrassed, I think, about the way in which Mr Hargreaves has conducted himself in the chair. It is not the appropriate way to behave, and Mr Hargreaves is becoming more and more of an embarrassment in that role, both in the chair and outside the chair.
Mr Hanson made that point. Mr Hargreaves said in his defence that he has always supported you. We know that is not true. We know that he was going around for a long time agitating for change in terms of the Speaker’s role and critiquing the dual role of the Speaker, so we know that is not true. He has supported you, I suppose, in the same way that he has supported some of his ministerial colleagues. He has failed to support them, but then he goes around gossiping about them, passing notes about them and showing gross disloyalty to them and to his party, which has been a feature of his behaviour.
Mr Speaker, the point Mr Hanson has made, which is worth reiterating, is that Mr Hargreaves’s behaviour outside the chair has been unacceptable. We have seen the demotions that reflect that. The Labor Party believe it is unacceptable. We now see that crossing over into his role in the chair. That is unacceptable, and that is where the Assembly should say: “We are going to actually have some standards of behaviour in this place. It starts with the chair. It starts with whoever is in that Speaker’s chair setting high standards.” Mr Hargreaves failed that today. He failed it to such a degree that you had to counsel him, Mr Speaker. We believe he is no longer fit to sit in that position.
MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Chief Minister, Minister for Health and Minister for Territory and Municipal Services) (5.32): I will speak briefly to the motion and in support of Mr Hargreaves continuing in his job as Assistant Speaker in this place. I must say that for anyone who has spent any amount of time in this chamber since 2008 to get a lecture from the Liberal Party about appropriate conduct in this place is a little hard to take. The issues that we have seen in question time, the personal jibes that have come across the chamber and the nastiness that has been exhibited have been largely from the opposition benches.
This afternoon, after a fairly robust question time—not one of the worst but not one of the best—my understanding is that the Assistant Speaker, in performing his duties, alerted members to what he had seen through question time to remind them about appropriate conduct for the rest of the afternoon. People have different views about how that was done, but Mr Assistant Speaker did it to provide advice to members.
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