Page 672 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 20 March 2018
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expect better from our Chief Minister.” We are not saying it is a hanging offence. We are not saying we should move a no-confidence motion and he should be sacked. We are saying that the Assembly should raise the bar and not tolerate this kind of spite from the Chief Minister of the ACT.
The Chief Minister has always been bitter—we know that. But in the last week he has taken his vindictiveness to a whole new level. We saw that this morning. Had the Chief Minister come into this place at 10 o’clock and made a one-minute, sincere apology for the hurt he has caused journalists and seniors and others, he would be in a much stronger position right now. Instead, in effect, he bunkered down and actually went beyond what he had said in those offensive remarks of a week and a half ago. He said there should not be editorial independence in journalism in Australia, that we should not have free press in Australia, and that people should not be able to express an opinion. It is quite possibly a matter for a privileges committee as to whether he has gone so far as to stifle the effects of the Human Rights Act in the ACT.
For 16 or 17 years the Labor Party, with the Greens’ support, have supposedly championed human rights. We now know that that was a sham, because the Chief Minister has demonstrated today and over the last week that he does not tolerate anybody having a different opinion to his. He does not tolerate anybody who has a different world view to his. He does not want journalists to report on the dodgy deals of his government.
The context in which the Chief Minister made these comments was, of course, after weeks of reporting of property scandals in his ministry. Whether you talk about the Dickson deal, the Glebe Park deal, the lakeside deal, the Griffith deal or the multitude of rural leases, all these have been reported on in the Canberra Times, on the ABC, on 2CC, on the FM stations, on 2CA and via other outlets in Canberra.
For the Chief Minister to say that the Canberra Times is a conservative, right-wing publication is news to me, and I reckon it is news to most Canberrans as well. And if it is, it is the only Fairfax paper in the country that gets that brand. It shows you how arrogant and how disconnected the Chief Minister is if he thinks the Canberra Times is a right-wing publication. Perhaps if Pravda delivered to the ACT he might get that on his front lawn each morning. But the reality is that all that we have seen from journalists in Canberra is the reporting of the facts on this government.
There have been many articles in the paper that I have disagreed with and there have been many slants in those stories that I think are incorrect. There have been opinions expressed on ABC Radio and on 2CC and other stations that I disagree with, but never would I say that I hate the people who wrote them or said them.
We all make mistakes, and the Chief Minister is right—it was a mistake and he should not have said it. But to then double down and, in effect, offer a defence of those statements is a very worrying thing from the Chief Minister of the ACT. We need to have freedom of the press in this country because it is a very slippery slope when you do not. We have seen countries around the world slip into dictatorships after remarks like this. I am not going to be a sensationalist and say that is the direction that we are going in—of course we are not. But we have to be vigilant. We actually have to fight
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