Ms O’CONNOR (Clark – Leader of the Greens) – Mr Speaker, I grew up in – well, I spent a fair bit of my childhood in Joh Bjelke-Peterson’s Queensland. Most of us who thought about it were well aware of the level of corruption in that state. As a young journalist, I found the experience of watching investigative journalists work with the then-Labor opposition to name, identify, the corrupt police commissioner Terry Lewis, to be quite heartening. We had grown up with the shackles of corruption over us and a rotten police service, and it was debilitating for Queensland.
The reason that Terry Lewis, the former corrupt, and late corrupt police commissioner, was able to be identified and his actions scrutinised was because of the judicious and careful use of parliamentary privilege. For almost 400 years, parliamentary privilege has been in place so there are no unreasonable barriers to parliamentarians doing their job in the public interest. Privilege is there for a reason.
We are concerned about developments in recent days. Now, having had a conversation, I believe that the Premier was genuinely worried about the contents of some letters that he received from the Equal Opportunity Commissioner and, on trust, I believe that that is part of what motivated the ministerial statement yesterday.
However, there are a few issues here. There is a real concern, or we have a real concern, that the Equal Opportunity Commissioner, who did outstanding work on the Motion for Respect report, has written two very similar letters to the Premier that contain within assertions about the impact on senior public servants of being identified in parliament under privilege. I am concerned if there are senior state servants who have had mental health impacts as a result of being named in parliament, but it may be one person to whom Sarah Bolt is referring; it may be three, it may be 10. We do not know from these two letters that we have.
We do know that, as a result of that correspondence, which was not sent to the Premier as a result of an investigation under the Anti-Discrimination Act or through any process that we can identify over which the Equal Opportunity Commissioner has jurisdiction as a result of that correspondence, we are now in a situation where the Premier has flagged a review of the Standing Orders and a referral to the Standing Orders Committee.
Now, this is dangerous territory because we have one statutory officer who has made some assertions in correspondence and the reflex of this Premier and this Government has been, ‘Oh well, we have to review the Standing Orders’. There can be no weakening of parliamentary privilege. There can be no special carve-out protection of senior, highly-paid bureaucrats. Why should senior state servants be treated differently from other people in the community or working in business or anywhere who may be named in parliament under privilege?
It is nonsense that we would change parliamentary privilege specifically to protect senior state servants. Here is the scenario: Estimates are coming up in early June, the minister sits there and says, ‘To my right is, for example, the secretary of the Department of Natural Resources and Environment Tasmania, Jason Jacobi’, right? The name is then on the record, and that is okay, apparently because we are only saying nice things about that senior state servant. It is nonsense and it is dangerous to even speculate about weakening parliamentary privilege which has served the Westminster system for nearly four centuries.
We still do not know why Commissioner Bolt sent two letters that created a situation where now we have a Standing Orders review. We do know that the secretary of DPAC sent a letter to Dr Woodruff two months after a statement Dr Woodruff said in this place, saying she felt aggrieved the day before the ministerial statement. That tells us two things: the secretary of DPAC is a political appointment and Jenny Gale is a political bureaucrat. In here we need to be able to say that.
If there is an issue with the administration of a government agency, we need to be able to identify the senior, highly paid state servants who are part of that. We are not talking about going after everyday, hardworking state servants. That is not what this is about. It is about being able to scrutinise people who are in very powerful positions, publicly funded, holding positions of public trust. To do that, we will have to name people from time to time, not just by their position. It is not for senior public servants to be telling us in here how we might exercise the privilege. It is not for Jenny Gale to suggest to Dr Woodruff, for example, ‘given the concerns raised above, I urge you to reconsider the way in which you refer to public servants and their appointments under parliamentary privilege’. Thank you, for your input, Ms Gale.
We are the parliament. Dr Woodruff is an MP. She exercises that role conscientiously. From time to time, she may name a senior public servant and it is entirely appropriate when it is cautiously done, that she does.
