Senate debates Committees

Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee; Reference


Katy Gallagher

Katy Gallagher ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service

4:19 pm

The government was happy to support this motion with two amendments. One was to remove the part on breaches of the code of conduct for ministers, because it's not up to committees to determine whether a code of conduct has been breached, and the other was to have inserted into the motion advice from previous Auditor-General's reports which specifically goes to the issue of how to handle the delivery of election commitments. We had agreement with the Greens around that amendment until, unfortunately, Senator Hodgins-May determined that she would rather reach agreement with the Liberals on this and refused to withdraw the code-of-conduct part. So I just want to make it clear that the government was keen to support this motion until we were unable to get those minor amendments—minor but important amendments—to this committee referral.

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