Page 1739 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 1 May 2012
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I would expect that someone who is saying that we need ethical standards, who is saying that we need an enhanced integrity framework, would say, as she has said in this, “It’s not just about the words; it’s about the actions.” The actions that we should have seen today from the Chief Minister, the Minister for Health, are these. She should have said: “Yes, there are some significant problems. Something has gone very seriously wrong. We do not understand why, but it has resulted in me providing misleading figures.” In essence, people who have been waiting in our emergency departments—the families, the grandmothers, the children who have been waiting longer than anyone else in Australia in an emergency department—have been lied to by this government about how long they are going to have to wait.
Instead of saying, “Shine the light; let’s have an investigation; I am prepared to show leadership as the first minister of this jurisdiction, and as your minister I will stand up and hold myself to the standard of probity that I am demanding of the ACT public service in this document,” what did she do? What did she do when she had that opportunity? She came in here—she stitched up meetings with the Greens before this became public—and she made every effort to hide the fact of why this occurred. She cannot deny the fact that it has, because that has been exposed by the Director-General.
She is calling for an examination of what went wrong. But when it comes to an examination of why—that it might taint her or her government in some way—do we see leadership? Do we see ethical behaviour? Do we see a minister behaving with integrity? Or do we see a minister who is stitching up behind closed doors in secret meetings with the Greens to say, “Let’s get the minimum amount investigated that we possibly can”?
This minister comes in here and lectures us on what this government is doing in terms of integrity, and incorporates within that words saying that it is not just about words written on paper but it is about our actions. This follows on from her behaviour this morning, which showed that when it comes to matters of integrity, when it comes to matters of ethics and when it comes to matters of shining a light on their own performance, she is not prepared to live up to the standard that she set in this document for her public service.
I think that we can quite rightly say that this is not worth the paper it is written on, because this minister, the Chief Minister of the ACT, has shown us, by her example today and in the past, that she is not prepared, when it comes to it, to hold herself to the same standards of integrity that she is demanding of others.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Carbon tax—cost impact
Discussion of matter of public importance
MR SPEAKER: I have received letters from Ms Bresnan, Mr Coe, Mr Doszpot, Mr Hanson, Mr Hargreaves, Ms Hunter, Ms Le Couteur, Ms Porter, Mr Seselja and Mr Smyth proposing that matters of public importance be submitted to the Assembly.
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