It is worth noting the dates of the tabled emails in relation to their contents in respect to what has been spun as being partisan collusion between Senator Hanson-Young and the Ombudsman to the extent of the destruction of the government's confidence in his being able to discharge his responsibilities.

Before going into more detail in regard to the emails, it is worth noting some subtle nuances with respect to the report dates set for the Joint Select Committee on Australia’s Immigration Detention Network that was set up on 16 June 2011. This web page, http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/immigration_detention_ctte/immigration_detention/info.htm , states that:

"It is anticipated that the Committee will report in March 2012."

That Committee's interim report to the Parliament dated 7 October 2011 posted on this web page, http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/immigration_detention_ctte/immigration_detention/interim_report/index.htm , states, at the conclusion of the second paragraph of its covering letter (effectively the totality of the report), :

"The committee requests its reporting date be extended to 30 March 2012."

Given that the anticipated report date was FROM THE OUTSET described as being some unspecified date in March 2012, and that no more specific reference to any March date earlier than the 30th is anywhere in evidence, am I alone in thinking that the request for EXTENSION creates an impression that as of not later than 6 October 2011 (when the Committee met) the inquiry was no longer ONGOING?

Should it be that no specific date in March 2012 earlier than the 30th thereof in the interim between 16 June and 6 October 2011 had been set by the Parliament for the Committee's reporting, then the request for an EXTENSION of reporting date was both unnecessary (the 30th being within the month of March originally specified) and misleading to the extent that it created any impression that the Committee's inquiry was no longer ongoing.

And if the Ombudsman, having given testimony before an ongoing inquiry of a Committee of the Parliament, was carpeted by the PM, would that not have amounted to the attempted intimidation of a witness?

Some brilliant research and analysis Forrest Gump.

A tawdry affair to say the least.

*Posted by Forrest Gumpp, Wednesday, 26 October 2011 10:40:33 AM*

" ... And if the Ombudsman, having given testimony before an ongoing inquiry of a Committee of the Parliament, was carpeted by the PM, would that not have amounted to the attempted intimidation of a witness? ... "

Hmmm .. I am recalling *Falkner's* prolonged hostile glare at the camera broadcast by the compliant ABC and considering its potential effect.

..

I would like to add a sprinkling of something extra that is related post having spoken to an individual that claimed to be a contract fly in fly out nurse at ChristMass island.

She did express a number of views about what she claimed to be those people who have entered australia through the back door, and her rhetoric did seem to me to largely conform to the sorts of things the guvment say on this matter.

She did though interestingly state that a full time nursing clinic is not in operation and that a lot of the time, and especially on week ends, interpreters or translated materials are simply not available, making her work as a nurse to range from the difficult too the impossible.

..

I am strongly opposed to unbridled capitalism and see it at times as being both dangerous and destructive.

I prefer hybridised systems with a healthy dollop of socialism where everyone has a right to a living wage/financial security solution.

Pelican,

I don't know that my research is all that brilliant.

I know that the anticipated March 2012 report date given on the web page headed 'Information about the Inquiry', http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/immigration_detention_ctte/immigration_detention/info.htm ,was displayed in bold type and attracts attention right up front. Nevertheless I am uneasy that the fact that the Committee's interim report dated 7 October 2011 asks for an EXTENSION of report date to 30 March 2012 indicates that somewhere some earlier specific date in March 2012 has been specified as the final report date. Can you see anything in this respect? http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/immigration_detention_ctte/immigration_detention/index.htm

I'm puzzled as to why the PM and the Special Minister of State felt that the Ombudsman had overstepped the mark in speaking to, and drafting questions for, the Green's spokesperson on Immigration, Senator Hanson-Young, which the Ombudsman did in May, when the government was happy to support in the Parliament the setting up of a Joint Select Committee on 16 June 2011 to inquire into, inter alia, the very issues of resourcing in relation to the ventilation of which the Ombudsman was felt to have lost the confidence of the government, three months BEFORE the emails that allegedly revealed the claimed partisan collusion were asked to be tabled?

I'm also puzzled as to why the interim report, if indeed there has been some earlier date in March 2012 already specified as the Committee's final report date, needs to request such an impliedly small extension in time so far in advance of that date? Surely, if there is somewhere buried some entirely different final report date much closer to the present, an interim report requesting such a, by inference, relatively larger extension in report time would surely contain more than two paragraphs?

Here's a twitpic of the PDF: http://twitpic.com/75wtb6

I should correct a statement in my previous post that could imply that the government proposed the currently ongoing Parliamentary inquiry into Australia's Immigration Detention Network that was set up on 16 June 2011. Hansard records Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Scott Morrison, moving that the inquiry be set up.
See: http://www.openaustralia.org/debates/?id=2011-05-30.24.2

Indeed, the Labor government was less than fully happy to institute this inquiry, as the remarks of Ed Husic MP to be found around half-way down the web page in the record of that debate reveal.

Ed Husic's remarks are corroborative of a claim that the government was less than fully sincere in claiming it lost confidence in the Ombudsman because he provided Senator Hanson-Young with some 'Dorothy Dix' questions to put to him at an estimates hearing. In the second paragraph of his speech to the motion Husic said:

"... If [Scott Morrison was] genuinely concerned
with the events in part (a) of his motion, we would
have heard about this proposed inquiry more than a
month ago. The reason we did not hear about it is
because the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship
responded quickly and effectively to the events on
Christmas Island and at Villawood by announcing an
arms-length independent inquiry led by experienced
public servants Helen Williams and Dr Allan Hawke. ..."

Ed Husic goes on in the sixth paragraph to say:

"As I have mentioned, we have already announced
independent reviews into the incidents at Christmas
Island and Villawood detention centre, and the Ombudsman
consistently investigates the detention system. ..."

Here we have the government funding an inquiry by two public servants who, no matter how competent or reputable they may be, are relatively junior to the Ombudsman, a Statutorily Appointed officer of seniority such that he is only dismisable from office by a vote from each House of the Parliament, at a time when that government says it cannot increase the Ombudsman's budget! That smacks of a loss of government confidence in the Ombudsman over a month before he had even sent the first email to Senator Hanson-Young.

Belly,

I was so pleased to see your post of the wee small hours of yesterday morning to another of your topics on this forum ('Nanny state?': http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=4804#127344 ) that made reference to Laurie Oakes' delivery of the ABC's 2011 Andrew Olle Media Lecture to which you were listening. Here is a transcript of that lecture, if you are interested in a print version:

http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2011/10/21/3345509.htm

In it Laurie at one point says:

"If we genuinely believe that serving a public good,
oiling the wheels of democracy, is part of the journalism
mission statement, then the onus is on us to try to do
something. To ask ourselves if there is a way to slow down
the news cyclone when issues sufficiently important to the
political debate are involved?"

I'm not a journalist in the sense that Laurie means, nor indeed in any sense at all, but I think I might be usefully slow, because slowing down the news cyclone is what I am trying to do in continuing to laboriously post to this topic, 'Should the Green Senator resign?'. Laurie Oakes spoke earlier in the lecture of the political reporting instincts of Warren Denning, and, quoting from Denning's book 'Inside Parliament', said:

"The man assigned to this work (they WERE all men back then)
has to be alive to every pulse-beat in the Parliamentary body,
able to detect the slightest trace of abnormality, able to
sense that things are going wrong, that something is out of tune,
that somebody is 'up to something'..."

`

I sense that something is out of tune here, that somebody is 'up to something', in the way this whole saga of the forcing of the Ombudsman's resignation has been brought about. I just wish I could write the right questions to ask myself on this forum, or that someone could write them for me.

Wouldn't it be good if Laurie was to read this thread. I wouldn't want to usurp his role.