Buswell rewarded for keeping head down

After keeping his head down since April following a series of "errors in his personal conduct", new West Australian cabinet minister Troy Buswell has been brought back into the political spotlight.

Half way through the government's term, WA Premier Colin Barnett announced his long awaited cabinet reshuffle on Tuesday, which he hopes will be the team he takes to the next election.

In what was the state's worst kept secret, Mr Buswell was handed the housing and transport portfolios while former cabinet minister Graham Jacobs was dumped to the backbench.

Advertisement: Story continues below It's been about seven months since the member for Vasse resigned as Treasurer after being embroiled in an affair with Greens MP Adele Carles and mistakenly admitting to misusing ministerial entitlements, having received bad advice.He was later cleared of any wrong doing by the Public Sector Commissioner.

The premier defended the decision to bring back Mr Buswell, saying the MP never engaged in criminal conduct.

"What Troy did was to confuse if you like or overlap his ministerial responsibility with his private life and in that sense it did compromise his role as minister," he told reporters.

"He did nothing illegal, nothing that was improper in a parliamentary sense."

Mr Barnett said his new transport and housing minister had a great deal of ability, a high intellect and enormous capacity for hard work and after serving on the back bench, it was time for him to be rewarded.

"I think Troy has kept his head down well over the last six months. I don't think you'll change Troy's character; he is a flamboyant person and I wouldn't want to change that," he said.

"I'm confident Troy will just put his head down and get on with the job and I've given him a couple of big jobs to take on."

The premier said he had attached no conditions to Mr Buswell's appointment but expected him to conduct himself in a professional way.

Mr Barnett acknowledged there will be people who will criticise the decision but Mr Buswell's mistakes were only "errors of judgement, they are basically errors in his personal conduct".

Mr Buswell made national headlines in 2008, resigning as opposition leader just days before the state election when it emerged he had sniffed the chair of a female Liberal Party staffer.

He was also enmeshed in allegations that he had snapped the bra of a Labor Party staffer, made sexist remarks and had grabbed a fellow Liberal MP in a "squirrel grip".

Another big winner in the cabinet reshuffle was the appointment of Christian Porter to the role of Treasurer as well as keeping his attorney general portfolio.

The premier said the government had already implemented most of its law and order agenda which freed Mr Porter to deal with Treasury issues.

However, some of the respectabilities under the Treasury portfolios have been split with former Transport Minister Simon O'Brien who takes on finance, commerce and small business.

Education Minister Liz Constable was stripped of her tourism portfolio to allow her to concentrate more on the independent schools program and the future implementation of the national curriculum.

Link -
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/buswell-rewarded-for-keeping-head-...
=============
What is improper, in a parliamentary sense?

Personally, I would have given him the keys to the stage.

The first stage leaving town! For the NSW Labor party?

skippy. wrote on Dec 14^th, 2010 at 3:28pm:


He was merely testing his new skills learnt at the sniffer dog training facility to determine if his employee was using drugs.

aussiefree2ride wrote on Dec 14^th, 2010 at 8:30pm:


http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/breaking/7072866/inside-story-staffer-tells-of-chair-sniffing-hell/

It was a panicked Troy Buswell who phoned former Liberal Party staffer Karry Smith with a bizarre question on February 15, 2008, just three weeks after he was elected Opposition Leader in a bitter struggle with Paul Omodei.

"He said I've just had a television crew stick a camera under my nose and ask me if I'd ever sniffed your chair. Have I?" Ms Smith told The West Australian in an exclusive interview this week.

"I was a bit taken aback because I don't think you'd forget about doing that to a person. I said yes you have and you know you have."

For the next 10 weeks Ms Smith endured a barrage of media inquiries as the chair-sniffing rumour circulated the WA political world. She became afraid to answer her phone. She begged Mr Buswell's office to deal with the situation, even offering to write a statement for Mr Buswell to read in Parliament but her entreaties were greeted with silence.

Now she wants to ensure that no one else is ever placed in the same situation she found herself in 2008 when the world turned its gaze on the bizarre story of the leading politician who sniffed the chair of a female worker.

"I see our Equal Opportunity Act as discriminatory now because I know what it means to be sexually harassed and not have any provisions of legislation to offer any kind of protection," Ms Smith, a 50-year-old mother of three adult children, said.

Link to full story above!!!

philperth2010 wrote on Dec 15^th, 2010 at 7:30am:



Sorry to inject a little bit of inconvenient reality into the hysteria.
The "respect for woman" dogma is over done to death by zealous fembonazis and hen pecked whimps. Phil living like a broken eunuch will get you contemptuous approval from the more generous of the dominant haglodite brigade, but the aim in that exercise is for men to have no respect for themselves, it`s not about "respect for woman".  Real women actually want men to be men, not cowering whimps, you need not go into Victorian hysterics over every little PC transgression.

Many women I know are comfortable with, and enjoy giving and receiving a bit of cheek, it`s fun.  Don`t be too afraid of Mummy, she`s got a sense of humor too.