Commissioner for Standards Ken Crispin has dismissed another complaint about the behaviour of an ACT politician, after Labor's Chris Bourke was photographed handing out taxpayer-funded brochures as part of his election campaign.
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Liberal campaign director Daniel Clode accused Dr Bourke of a using the brochures, produced after the 2016 budget, as primary campaign material in "a calculated abuse of public resources, as part of an effort to subvert electoral expenditure caps".
Mr Clode complained to speaker Vicki Dunne, herself a Liberal, asking Mrs Dunne to refer the complaint to Dr Crispin, a retired judge who investigates complaints about parliamentarians breaching their code of conduct.
Mr Clode sent photographs of Dr Bourke handing out the brochures at the Kippax and Jamison shops in August, surrounded by Labor campaign material and campaign volunteers. Mr Clode suggested Dr Bourke had breached the code of conduct, which says members should make only proper use of public resources.
But Dr Crispin said it was not his job to investigate alleged attempts to circumvent caps on election spending, which were a matter for the Electoral Commission.
Dr Bourke had apparently used the brochures for the purpose they were produced - to provide people with detailed information about the ACT budget.
"He presumably acted as he did because he believed, rightly or wrongly, that the information they disclosed would reflect favourably on the Labor government and that this might improve his prospects of re-election and perhaps that of his party.
"There is an obvious need for members to be conscious of the fact that neither their own political ambitions not those of their party are coextensive with the public interest and to comply scrupulously with the principle expressed in [the code of conduct] whilst campaigning for re-election," Dr Crispin said.
But the code did not expressly prevent an otherwise proper use public resources during election campaigns.
"A political motive for the provision of budgetary information to potential voters does not, in my opinion, demonstrate that the use of brochures prepared by the government for that purpose can be said to have been improper."
Dr Crispin said he understood concern might be generated by intermingling government brochures and election material, but it was not necessarily inconsistent with the code of conduct - and any changes to the code were a matter for the parliamentarians. He said the complaint should be dismissed.
It is the fifth complaint dismissed by Dr Crispin in two years, and it has given rise to debate about the role of the Speaker in referring complaints to him. In a recent case involving Liberal leader Jeremy Hanson, Mrs Dunne was accused by Labor of "tainting" Dr Crispin's investigation by "editorialising" on whether the complaint was justified.
In the latest complaint, when Mrs Dunne referred the complaint to Dr Crispin, she told him that she had raised the question of Dr Bourke's behaviour with Mr Clode and one of her campaign volunteers and staff members had taken some of the photographs. "When I raised the issue with Mr Clode several weeks ago, it did not cross my mind that he would make a complaint under the code," she said. "I thought it was a matter for the Electoral Commissioner."
Dr Bourke said Mrs Dunne's intervention had been "startlingly biased", and he accused the Liberals of "a desperate attempt to smear my good name".
"It was a cheap, nasty and groundless political manoeuvre with no basis," he said.
