Page 1665 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 1 May 2012
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The reporting of what has gone on stems from a statement by the head of the directorate that said that the data is inaccurate, and what has been presented to this place is inaccurate. Therefore the minister who presented that data must be held to account. The code of conduct gives you the process. It says:
Ministers should take reasonable steps to ensure the factual content of statements they make in the Assembly is soundly based and that they correct any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity.
It has not been corrected. There is no withdrawal, there is no apology, there is no attempt to make amends, and the Greens think that is okay. This is the double standard of the Greens.
The Greens’ policy says that governments should “work to prevent corruption”. Until they are held to account, they will not. You can go back to 2003 in the Assembly, where there were some startling inquiries into this minister’s management of health, and on every occasion the Greens falter. They are more about their position. They are more about their private briefings. Apparently, I am told that Ms Hunter got briefed on this before it was even made public. She got out of a committee meeting early and had to skip off to lunch with the Chief Minister so that she could get the inside goss, so that she could find out.
We need to hear from Ms Hunter when she found out about this. In this new era of openness and accountability, who is being open and who is being accountable? There is no openness from the government and there is no accountability from the Greens. And that is the problem with the Greens-Labor alliance. It is very comfortable, it is very cosy, but what it is not doing is standing up on behalf of the community to hold the government to account.
Principle 5 of the Greens’ corporate governance policy says:
Government-owned organisations have an added responsibility to demonstrate exemplary governance …
Is this exemplary governance? I do not believe it is. I do not think anybody in their right mind could think that about this circumstance, with the scandal and the stench that are pervading this place now. We have a Chief Minister standing aside effectively from her portfolio responsibilities because of an unknown conflict of interest but we have the attorney saying, “It’s just a perception.” He obviously knows more than the rest of us and it will be interesting to see whether Mr Corbell stands by those words. Why can’t we know what that is?
Where is this new era of openness and accountability? And are the Greens enforcing this new era of openness and accountability? They are not. They are not going to because they never have, and they never will because their ideological bent says, “We’ll support the Labor government against anybody else because that’s the best place for us to keep our snouts in the trough, making sure that we’ve got the inside run and we get the extra funding, that we’ll get all the bits and pieces that come with being the ally of the Labor Party instead of being the protector of the community.” Third-party insurance it is not.
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