Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin) – Mr Deputy Speaker, freedom of speech, freedom of the right to congregate, freedom of protest, freedom of information, integrity in politics. These are the things that really matter. They matter so much, because what we have is a precious crucible of trust that people give to their elected representatives. It is something that can dissolve if we do not protect it. What we are seeing under the Liberal government is a steady erosion of Tasmanians’ trust in their political representatives. We are all tarnished by it. We are tarnished by association.
Things have, unbelievably, got worse. We would have thought premier Will Hodgman was the worst when it came to slippery deals, secret backdoor meetings and arrangements with developers, and withholding of information. Things continue to decline, despite then-premier Gutwein’s promises. Peter Gutwein promised to improve the situation after Ombudsman, Integrity Commission and Auditor-General’s reports showed that Tasmania has the worst response to Right to Information requests of the nation.
He funnelled a couple of thousand dollars more to the Ombudsman, did a little bit of tinkering around the edges, but fundamentally did not make any changes in terms of the directions to heads of departments about what their core business was. The core business under the Liberals has always been to ensure that they have public servants whose first duty is to protect the political risk for the ministers. Where it is not possible for a public servant to re arrange the material, to fail to put things in writing, as they are obviously, the culture is set. It is established. It is directed, we have heard, from people in departments, people are directed not to put things in writing. They are told to have conversations and do not put it in writing.
That is sure-fire way to make sure there is no paper trail. An annoying paper trail, like we have seen recently, with the Speaker and his personal family associations with the Bracknell Hall, and the $400 000. The recent $400 000 following on the $600 000 that he got from the federal government into that tiny community in Tasmania, into a hall which his family has been sitting on and organising successive grants for. I think this is the fifth public money that has gone there. Meanwhile the Cygnet Sea Dragons still do not have a toilet.
But I digress. This is about the fact that when it is not possible for public servants to rearrange the material to protect ministers, ministers will rearrange the evidence to protect themselves. They will do whatever is required to make sure that the public does not find out what they are really trying to do. So, we did have minister Jaensch come into parliament and falsely claim that he was not aware of any changes, or undertaking regarding changes, to laws of the Residential Tenancy Act that would make it easier to evict tenants without genuine or just reason. We know it was false because we tendered the Cabinet document as evidence. We tendered the document, but still, the minister and the premier at the time, Peter Gutwein, continued to pretend that it was not true.
That is okay, let us call black white, let us just say we never actually intended to evict people in a housing crisis for no reason. That is what they wanted to do. They have been trying to do that for ages but they did not want people to know it because they know. Although the Liberals do not understand what integrity is, they do know that it stinks when they do not tell people the truth. People hate it. I do not believe the Liberals have an integrity compass in the party. Individual members might, but they are all too few and what we see in ministers like minister Barnett, in particular, who serially will tell ‘porkies.’ He is very good at learning the Liberal Party’s lines. Minister Barnett is excellent at learning the lines the Liberal Party database of what you say on an issue. He is very good at that, but he is not very good at adjusting to the circumstances and so he does not get the software update that provides him with the truth about what people think on an issue and so he just keeps spitting out the lines.
Mr Barnett in this instance, everyone in Tasmania who was listening on ABC radio heard you. They heard the fact you denied the reality of what you promised at the last election. They heard the fact you are prepared to throw the truth under the bus to get yourself out of a scrape. They know that you can do something about power prices. They know you choose not to do something about power prices because of this super ridiculous, complex deal you are trying to stitch up with billions of Tasmanians’ dollars to sling another couple of interconnectors to the mainland and do nothing about the emissions that we are putting into the atmosphere every single day. No plan for that. It is just all about big business on the mainland. Hang the cost for Tasmanians. You do not care. That is why you are pretending you never promised to do that, but we know and the evidence is there, but you did.
