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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2018-07-25 Daily Xml
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Keogh Case

Mr KOUTSANTONIS (West Torrens) (14:56): My question is to the Attorney-General. Why won't the Attorney-General release all the legal advice relating to the $2.57 million payment to Henry Keogh? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain my question.

Leave granted.

Mr KOUTSANTONIS: When the former attorney-general claimed legal privilege on advice in relation to the fairness clause, the current Attorney-General said, and I quote, 'Giving no-one in parliament the opportunity to investigate' that advice was, and I quote, 'unconscionable'.

The Hon. V.A. CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General) (14:56): Firstly, in respect of the matter raised as to legal advice in respect of the Keogh payment, yes, I have viewed legal advice, and it is, of course, advice to government, as the member for West Torrens well knows, which obviously is privileged for good reason.

When the fairness clause was raised in the dying days of the last parliament last year on the last day, when the then government exercised an agreement with the Greens to remove the fairness clause, the member, who is now the Leader of the Opposition and who was managing this debate in the other place, referred in those debates to having been in possession of legal opinion identifying the legality of changing the constitution, that is, by removal of the fairness clause without a referendum and that indeed it was otherwise constitutional.

In the discussion in respect of the debate as to whether or not it was constitutional, it was reasonable actually to seek any advice or any stakeholders' contribution in respect of the reform. As a parliament, we were being asked to change the state constitution in respect of a clause that had gone to the people of South Australia in the 1980s to insert, to provide, a fairness clause in respect of electoral boundary redistributions, and it was—

Mr Malinauskas: That's actually not right.

The Hon. V.A. CHAPMAN: I beg your pardon?

Mr Malinauskas interjecting:

The Hon. V.A. CHAPMAN: The 1990s. Late 1989, we had the election campaign. You might not have been born then, so I'm not very interested in getting into that. So then we debated this for some time and had that referendum. In my view, and I remain of this view, it was unconscionable for the then Labor government to come to this parliament on the last day of the parliament and push through an amendment to change the constitution, demanding that change, using its power to do so, and then try to claim that it had had all this legal advice upon which it was going to ask us to do this. I consider that was unconscionable then and I still do.

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