Page 2737 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 20 October 1992
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I think the only thing that really surprised me about it, Madam Speaker, was that so many people, and so many Canberrans, saw fit to inflict themselves with watching this program on a Sunday night when they could have been watching the seventy-fifth rerun of Rumpole of the Bailey.
Mr Humphries: Or The Simpsons.
MS FOLLETT: Or The Simpsons. Anyway, Madam Speaker, the program regrettably does seem to have an audience and that audience feels outraged by the report, and so they should. On behalf of the Government, Madam Speaker, I quite unreservedly accept our role in correcting this very spiteful and ill informed depiction of the ACT. I agree with Mr De Domenico's comments on this matter.
Madam Speaker, I think that it is not the first time that the ACT has been attacked by 60 Minutes. Members might recall that some time ago the same program did a piece on the removal of asbestos from Canberra homes. The point that they wished to make there was very critical of the asbestos removal program in the ACT. They claimed that it was unnecessary, was a waste of money and was a total overindulgence. Just by way of showing up their extreme opportunism, Madam Speaker, only last Sunday, I think, the same program ran a story on the Western Australian Government for the health risks that they were supposedly taking by not removing asbestos from houses. As I say, objectivity is not the strong point of this program. We have to recognise that.
The program that they ran on Sunday also left out another significant item that I happen to know about, and that was some work that the 60 Minutes crew did at the Forrest Primary School. I am told that the crew spent at least half an hour filming at the Forrest Primary School and in fact left in some dejection because they found that it was no different from a state school anywhere else. Of course, that did not suit their story, so they left it out. The fact is that they had written the story before they arrived and they therefore set out to make that fiction match their view of reality. Madam Speaker, they came to the town with the story, as I say, and selectively put together little pieces that suited it. They have clearly demonstrated, I think, how little the program has to do with journalism and how slavishly they pursue ratings; but, as I say, it is my belief that in so doing they insult their audiences. People are smarter than that; they do not believe everything that Mr Carleton puts before them.
The ACT Government has moved to correct some of Mr Carleton's glaring inaccuracies. There is nothing, I believe, that we can do about his journalistic shortcomings. If that was the intention of Mr De Domenico's MPI, I am sorry; I cannot fix that. But I will certainly try to correct his story. Madam Speaker, I will be writing to the producers of 60 Minutes to detail the many factual errors that were in the episode on Sunday. I have also invited any other national current affairs program which wishes to make an objective story about the ACT to come and have a look at Canberra and its citizens. I have offered them assistance in doing that.
I think it is very significant that Mr Carleton's program used so few Canberra citizens. They were nearly all outsiders. I think that we can always find people to criticise the ACT from outside; clearly he has. I think we ought to respond not only to the particular attack that Mr Carleton has mounted. I think that we cannot treat this matter in a vacuum and that we ought to look at what is being done to promote a positive image of our Territory to other Australians and to other countries. That effort is continuing.
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