Page 1774 - Week 05 - Thursday, 10 May 2018
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
of this constitutional issue were not citizens of other countries but they were entitled to the rights and privileges of another country.
Those are things that can be looked at. I actually do not think that any privilege inquiry would come down with any sort of reprimand for anyone in this process. I suspect that everything that has happened has happened inadvertently and unwittingly. But it is still the case that on the basis of the motion moved by the Chief Minister in March 2015 this Assembly was misled.
The Chief Minister moved a motion that said that this was a person qualified to take up the position. That is not true. The High Court has determined that yesterday. It determined that the former senator was not eligible in 2016. Therefore, axiomatically, she was not eligible in 2015.
The other issue in this is our relationship with the Governor-General. In relation to the chain of events, in November I had to seek advice from the Clerk because my memory was not great. My advice from the Clerk was that after the motion was passed I wrote to the Chief Minister and said, “This is the motion that is passed. It is now your job to convey the sentiment of the Assembly to the Governor-General.”
I was part of a chain of communication that ended up with the Governor-General that was misleading. On the face of it, it is misleading. I think it is appropriate for a privileges committee to look at not only whether the information provided, wittingly or unwittingly, by the Chief Minister at the time was misleading but also whether there are remedies for that. If a privileges committee said, “Yes, it was misleading,” it would probably be the case that the committee would say to the Chief Minister that he needed to correct the record at the earliest possible time. End of story.
The committee should also consider whether or not we misled the Governor-General and what we should do about that. I do not know; perhaps we write a letter and say that we stuffed up, that we have looked at our procedures and we hope this will not happen again. But I think it is worth noting that these things should be acknowledged in a grown-up legislature.
We are approaching our 30th year as a legislature. We should be able to look at ourselves and honestly say where we have failed, if we have failed. That is what a privilege inquiry would do. A privilege inquiry with representatives of all parties in this place would look rationally at the matter, not in a way to blame people but to make sure that we do as much as we possibly can to ensure that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past, because we did make a mistake. We did make an appointment that, as it turned out in hindsight—you know, hindsight makes us very wise—was a mistake.
But now we have the advantage of that wisdom, let us look at our processes and make sure that we get it right in the future. It is my personal view that at the very least this statutory declaration is not prescribed in any way in the continuing resolution but that the same statutory declaration has been used on both occasions. Maybe we need to have a review of the statutory declaration as well, which is why Mr Coe’s motion also refers the matter back to administration and procedure.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video