Pic: ABC here
The Mercury article announcing Ritchie’s return tilt, by Philip Heyward (Jan 19 2013) says:
“She had been attacked for hiring family members in her electoral office but Auditor-General Mike Blake found she did not break any rules.”
This was then recycled in the Sunday Tasmanian by Matt Smith here
An extremely similar claim had appeared unchallenged for over a year on the Wikipedia page about Ritchie, from 4 Dec 2011 until I edited it immediately after the publication of Heyward’s article:
“Allegations relating to office staffing arrangements were found to be baseless with the Auditor General finding that “Ms Ritchie did not break any rules””.
In fact the Auditor-General’s findings relating to Ritchie were far from exonerative and the summary by both the Mercury and the Wikipedian in question (who had the hide to revert my edit without even stating a reason!) is grossly misleading. For instance, here is the context of the Wikipedia quote above from the Auditor-General’s report:
“Prior to December 2007, the Legislative Council had no formal policies and processes regarding recruitment of staff to work in MLC’s electorate offices. So, it follows that in recommending the recruitment of her mother, Ms Ritchie did not break any rules.”
In other words, Ms Ritchie broke no rules not because the claims were baseless, but because there were no rules to break (at least, there were none at the time she didn’t break them.) The report immediately goes on to harshly criticise Ritchie as follows:
[..]
Read full article: http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/legco-two-early-challengers.html
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(This piece will be updated as more candidates are added.)
