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Legislative Assembly 4608 LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY Wednesday 22 November 2006 ______ Mr Speaker (The Hon. John Joseph Aquilina) took the chair at 10.00 a.m. Mr Speaker offered the Prayer. Mr SPEAKER: I acknowledge the Gadigal clan of the Eora nation and its elders and thank them for their custodianship of country. AUDIT OFFICE Report Mr Speaker tabled, pursuant to section 38E of the Public Finance and Audit Act 1983, the Performance Audit Report entitled "Major Infectious Disease Outbreaks—Readiness to Respond: NSW Health", dated November 2006. Ordered to be printed. ADOPTION AMENDMENT BILL Message received from the Legislative Council returning the bill with amendments. Consideration of amendments deferred. VALEDICTORY SPEECHES Mr ANDREW TINK (Epping) [10.01 a.m.] (Valedictory Speech): From the time I first sat in this Chamber as an 11-year-old schoolboy as a guest of my then local member, John Maddison, I wanted to be a member of the New South Wales Parliament. It took me another 24 years to make my maiden speech in support of the Greiner Government's Summary Offences Bill to wind back Frank Walker's laissez faire approach to the criminal law. It is the only speech I have read in this Chamber until now, and I seek your indulgence to read this one. While I was proud to be a member of Nick Greiner's fast-moving reformist Government, my personal political progress was depressingly slow and much of my time was taken up on parliamentary committees. Looking back on things now, those were some of my most productive and enjoyable years. As a result of my membership of the Privacy Committee, I was able to introduce what I believe was the first bill in Australia on data protection, although in recent years ramped up privacy laws have been used to trump freedom of information laws—something I never intended. My first chairmanship was of the Ombudsman's Committee. The then Ombudsman David Landa was deeply suspicious when I announced a public inquiry into his handling of complaints against police. But the committee was able to hold an unprecedented joint meeting with Mr Landa and the then police Commissioner Tony Lauer, at which the Ombudsman agreed to the police handling minor complaints as management issues while the commissioner agreed to a widening of the Ombudsman's jurisdiction to directly investigate serious complaints. Ted Pickering then legislated to give effect to this agreement in a system that survived the Wood royal commission and continues largely intact. In 1992 I became Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee. With the assistance of a wonderfully talented staff, the committee produced a record number of reports into things as diverse as school student transport, public defenders and infrastructure. The Cabinet with the political courage to tackle the anomalies of school transport has probably not yet been born, though the public defender's report led to statutory recognition of that office. However, it was the infrastructure reports that really broke new ground and the phrase "public private partnerships" soon gained wide circulation. The Government formally adopted many of the committee's recommendations as it proceeded with private sector participation in the huge construction program for the 2000 Olympics. 22 November 2006 LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY 4609 Since then, however, the reputation of public private partnerships has suffered, especially with the debacle over the Cross City Tunnel. But this project failed the committee's most basic test: the appropriate balance between public and private risk—an issue as old as New South Wales itself. In 1786-87 the Home Secretary Lord Sydney spent £54,000 to ensure that his able contractor William Richards could adequately provision the First Fleet, as a result of which there were only about 23 deaths on the voyage out. But his successor, the young up and comer William Grenville, keen to make a name for himself in Cabinet as a cost cutter, sacked Richards and replaced him with the London slaving firm of Camden, Calvert and King, saving over £20,000 in the process. As a result, 267 people died during the Second Fleet's voyage and the conditions were so bad that one of the captains was prosecuted for murder. The message then and now is simple: get the public-private balance of risk right. With road projects, such as the proposed tunnel through my electorate linking the F3 and M2, traffic counts are the key to measuring this risk, which is why I have advocated a short, sharp public inquiry into the traffic counts that were used to justify this tunnel option. So much of committee time these days is taken up in search of a headline by the highly aggressive cross-examination of witnesses. While tough questioning is part of public accountability, not much from these confrontations seem to stand the test of time. I think parliamentary committees should remember that they have an opportunity to do what executive governments cannot do: bring those with conflicting points of view together to test them on oath in public to find common ground and devise good public policy out of the process. By backing my friend Peter Collins in the leadership ballot following Nick Greiner's resignation, it took me until July 1994 to reach the dizzy heights of Parliamentary Secretary to the Premier. It was not that I did not get on with John Fahey—I admired him immensely for his work in introducing enterprise agreements as industrial relations Minister. It was just that he had other political debts to pay. Such is life in politics. When I arrived at the "Black Stump" as the Premier's office tower was then known, I was returning to a place where I had worked over three university vacations for Premiers Askin, Lewis and Willis. My job as an Assistant Service Officer in the 1970s had been to serve tea and biscuits, lay out the Cabinet table and wash up after Lady Askin's Christmas parties. After I got my Arts degree, I was put in the research section, trying to figure out how to stop Gough Whitlam claiming large chunks of coastal New South Wales under the new Law of the Sea legislation. As Parliamentary Secretary, I soon discovered that the Premier's Department staff had consulted the departmental archives to try to figure me out. We got on okay and at the beginning of 1995, when John Fahey turned to campaigning full time, I was left to deal with all his correspondence on the advice of the Premier's Department head, Col Gellatly, and his Chief of Staff, Robert Maher. Our proud boast was that we had to get the Premier off a helicopter only once—to deal with a letter from the Federal transport Minister, Laurie Brereton, who was trying to fit us up over the third runway fiasco. Mr Bryce Gaudry: Truth in sentencing. Mr ANDREW TINK: I will come to that. Otherwise, we handled everything, including all ministerial correspondence and the referral of a high profile statutory body to the ICAC. Following the defeat in March 1995—where, by the way, John Fahey and Ian Armstrong got almost 53 per cent of the popular vote—I finally made it on to the front bench under Peter Collins, and within a year, I was Shadow police Minister. With the implementation of the Wood royal commission reports, these were momentous times. Some of Wood's recommendations I agreed with and some I did not. Beyond any doubt, the ICAC had failed in one of the key tasks Greiner had set it, namely, rooting out police corruption. I very strongly supported Wood's recommendation to set up the Police Integrity Commission [PIC] to do what the ICAC had failed to do. The more powerful an investigative body, such as the PIC is, the greater is its responsibility to act fairly. So, when ABC Four Corners broadcast PIC telephone intercepts relating to Operation Florida before they had been introduced as evidence at PIC hearings into that operation, I lodged a complaint with the PIC Inspector. The Hon Mervyn Finlay, QC, found that the steps the PIC took to ensure that Four Corners would not put such intercepts to air had failed, and he held the commission accountable in his report of 8 November 2001, copies of which are in the Parliamentary Library. The inspector's emphatic conclusion was that, "What happened should not have happened!" Nevertheless, I note in his book Jonestown at page 412, that Chris Masters seems to think this was somehow a plot cooked up by Alan Jones and me to attack Four Corners. Nothing could be further from the truth. Justice Finlay's report speaks for itself and I thank Alan Jones for airing this matter. While I supported the creation of the PIC, I did not agree with Wood's recommendations that resulted in the amalgamation of the then 160-odd locally led and locally based police patrols into 80 local area 4610 LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY 22 November 2006 commands. In my view there was insufficient evidence of police corruption in the uniform branch to justify this reorganisation, and the abolition of police patrols such as Cronulla and Lakemba later made it difficult for police to nip in the bud the sort of conduct that led to last summer's riots. But Wood's recommendation 12 to legislate to give the commissioner clear authority over operations and the Minister over policy, so far ignored, needs to be revisited in the wake of those riots. By far my biggest political fight was with police Minister Paul Whelan over his hotel interests. Where are you, Davina? I promised I would be good! My view was simple, especially during the reform process when so much was being asked of senior police who were prohibited from holding hotel interests: The Minister who, at the end of the day could direct such police, should set the example and divest himself of his interests.
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