It might be helpful to us all as we work our way through this to reflect on what we're trying to achieve with these amendments. It is to prevent the Ethics Officer from being combined with the Ethics Commissioner on the basis that it would be....
It flows from a couple of directions. First, the Senate, both Conservative and Liberal members, worked for about a year on ensuring that they had their own Ethics Officer so that the two houses did not seem to conflict, or that one did not have authority over the other, or even worse--and I think this is Mr. Walsh's concern--that the executive did not infringe upon Parliament.
So this is simply to preserve the Ethics Officer in the Senate's own system.