Page 1662 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 1 May 2012
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Minister for showing exactly the leadership that would be expected in these circumstances. They should instead be recognising that the decision the Chief Minister has taken in standing aside from any oversight of the outcomes of the investigations now underway is entirely the appropriate course of action to ensure that there is no perception of a potential conflict of interest. There is no conflict of interest but there is the ability for that perception to arise, and to address that issue the Chief Minister has taken the steps that she has taken. That is appropriate. That is leadership.
The comments made by Mr Hanson in his speech calling for the board of inquiry were desultory at best. There was, in fact, no substantiation for the claims Mr Hanson sought to make today. Whether it was in relation to the issue surrounding Calvary, which he is on the record as acknowledging he has no evidence for and yet continues to make such claims outside and inside this place, or whether it was the so-called coincidence between the questions he asks and the actions the Chief Minister took, I think, says more about Mr Hanson’s sense of his own self-importance than it does about any real, substantive argument in relation to his motion.
The real problem for the Liberals, of course, is that the Chief Minister has indicated that there is every scope for an independent and impartial investigation into all these matters. And she has said that the Auditor-General should become involved. The problem for the Liberals is that they now seem to claim that the Auditor-General is not independent, that the Auditor-General does not have sufficient powers, that the Auditor-General, in some way, is now the lackey of the government when it comes to these matters. Of course, such claims belie the repeated occasions where they have stood in this place and called for the Auditor-General to be involved in other matters which they believed warranted investigation.
The fact is that the Auditor-General has whatever powers are believed necessary to deal with these issues. In fact, there was, of course, an Auditor-General’s inquiry that led to the ultimate resignation of the former Chief Minister, Kate Carnell, in relation to discrepancies and failings in relation to the Financial Management Act.
So this Chief Minister has said she has no problem with the Auditor-General being involved. She has no problem with the Auditor-General investigating and inquiring into this matter and she has invited the Auditor-General to do so. But apparently now that is not good enough. It was good enough for the Liberals on plenty of other occasions over the last four years but it is not good enough now.
But there is no real argument why it is not good enough. There is no real argument why the Auditor-General, an independent statutory officer who reports to this Assembly, not to the executive but to this Assembly, is suddenly not a sufficient watchdog, oversight or investigative agency and we need a board of inquiry. I think Mr Hanson mentioned the term “board of inquiry” once in his speech. It was certainly a desultory mention or series of mentions if there was more than one. That really highlights that he does not have an argument around the board of inquiry.
Finally, he certainly does not have an argument when it comes to the issue of censure. The Chief Minister has, at all times, sought to provide timely and accurate information to the community and when discrepancies have been brought to her
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