This is a very politically charged environment. This is what politics is all about. From my perspective, as someone who's actually been elected and who understands what it's like to be here and knows what it's like to have false or misleading allegations levelled at you because someone hopes to create a perception, whether the allegation is true or not.... Sometimes that creates a sense in the court of public opinion because of the role that I play—and it could happen to any one of us at this table—that already we're in a court of public opinion, and once an allegation is brought forward, even if it's unsubstantiated, it does the damage that it was intended to do. We have some folks thinking that's an acceptable thing to do. Most criminal investigations would never release the investigation until.... There's a reason young offenders aren't named. There's a reason people aren't named until they're actually convicted, and so on. There are good reasons for that.
In the presumption in the court of public opinion, the damage could already be done simply through the fact that an allegation or an investigation is being conducted by a commissioner, for example. Those investigations could easily be triggered by any one of us asking the commissioner to investigate a fellow colleague from a different political party, or whatever the case might be. That could be an effective political tool. In most cases, these investigations yield nothing. For example, they might be just blind, shooting in the dark, hoping that something's going to stick.
In the event that someone is investigated and nothing is actually found, do you think that you or a parliamentarian or an elected official or a public office holder should have the right to know? Common law, I think, pretty much tells you that you have the right to face your accuser. In some of these cases, we don't know who has levelled the allegation or complaint.
Do you think there's anything that could or should be done? Is there something done in other countries that's different from what we're doing now? Should that kind of information be made available to the accused?