I guess this is what you would call a conflict of interest.
Labor MP Carolyn Hirsh has resigned as chairwoman of State Parliament’s Drugs and Crime Prevention Committee after being caught drink-driving.
Ms Hirsh blew .07 – .02 above the limit – when police breath-tested her late on Wednesday night as she drove home from an ALP function that sources say descended into a rowdy affair.
Describing herself as a “bloody idiot”, Ms Hirsh, 66, offered her resignation to Premier Steve Bracks yesterday.
She said she could not continue on the committee while it was working on a report about strategies to reduce harmful alcohol consumption. She hoped to rejoin the committee after the September release of the report.
Ms Hirsh was breath-tested at a booze bus in Burke Road, Glen Iris, after 11pm.
She has been fined $300 and her licence has been suspended for six months.
Ms Hirsh, the upper house member for Silvan, said she had four glasses of white wine in four hours, including two glasses in the hour before she left the ALP’s “chookhouse party”, a traditional function held in a building at the rear of Parliament House to mark the end of a parliamentary session.
“I feel very bad,” she said yesterday.
I bet she does. It is called being hung over.
