Godwin Ready to Go to Senate Inquiry

Godwin Hulse

One more issue on the senate in tonight’s news…Senator Godwin Hulse will appear before the Senate Special Select Committee in the very near future. As Minister of Immigration and Nationality, he has direct charge over the Department that is being discussed at the inquiry.  But he will sit in front of mostly junior colleagues in the Senate, of which he is Leader of Government Business, second only to the President.  Hulse told us today that he wants his opportunity to address the Department’s sordid past and his efforts at brightening its future. He also took the opportunity to clarify his original stance against having a Committee to investigate the Department which he leads.

Godwin Hulse, Leader of Government Business

“It should be next week – I understand there is a little delay because there is no hearing today; so I might be pushed down a week – that’s good. I look forward to going there and to clarifying some of the points that are dangling in the public’s minds, and in fact, to setting the record straight with respect to many of the improvements and changes that we have made in the Department from those unfortunate dates to now, so I look quite forward to that. I have full support, all the time, for public inquiries; it was misconstrued and misrepresented and misunderstood when I voted in the Senate initially, two times, with respect to the Senate inquiry because I am a structured person and I am not driven by the emotion of the day and how we feel. I am a strict, structured person and therefore I have always maintained that the structures should be complied with and be honored and be respected. Now, we may or may not like some of those processes; when we don’t like that, we change the law accordingly. But as long as the law obtains, we follow those processes.”