Page 2815 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 August 2013
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approach to this committee process. You will see, if you read that report, how partisan the Labor members were and what I had to deal with as the chair with their very partisan approach to the hearings. So the sense that there was some sort of partisan approach from one side and not the other is a nonsense.
Secondly, I make no apologies for asking hard questions or being demanding of both ministers and officials, because that is my job, and that is the job of the committee. That is something that we did, I think, diligently throughout the whole process. I understand that at times ministers became uncomfortable, and I understand that at times officials sometimes are uncomfortable. As we know, and as we know based on a 2003 privileges inquiry in this Assembly, this government has form in being evasive when it comes to estimates inquiries.
I refer members to the privileges report of the Assembly for 2003, I think it was, where it was found that a senior health official had distributed a memo across the senior executive of ACT Health instructing them on how to evade questioning from the opposition—how to, essentially, get away with murder at the estimates committee. That went to every senior health official, and no senior health official raised any concern with that. This was the way to do business. In ACT Health, that is the way to do business—to evade, to do what you can not to answer the opposition’s line of questioning.
If you read that report, it is damning. It is absolutely damning. So I make no excuse for asking the hard questions. Indeed I would be abrogating my responsibility if I did not. If you refer back to committees chaired by members of the then opposition prior to this government, you will see the same approach, and you see it up on the hill—Liberal or Labor members. As I spoke a little while ago, you can reflect on John Faulkner and the hard line of questioning that he takes, which was respected across the political spectrum.
Let us be honest about what is happening here. We have an entirely partisan approach that has been taken by the Labor members of this committee. The proof, Madam Speaker, is in their report. It is a report with 575 recommendations, and over 500 of the recommendations are simply congratulating the government. I think that is the definitive proof you need that, as chair, it was a very difficult exercise to control two entirely partisan members of the committee.
In responding to another point, as to whether the process, particularly the consideration of the report, was conducted in accordance with the standing orders, I will quote from the advice I received from the Clerk on this matter:
I understand that you have ruled that the draft report be considered paragraph by paragraph and that in accordance with standing order 248 any member objecting to a portion of the report must move an amendment. Unless a member moves such an amendment, the paragraph remains. Standing order 248 could be interpreted in a number of ways, but my advice is that your interpretation of the standing order is one way that the standing order could be interpreted.
Mr Barr: So, in other words, it is inconclusive.
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