Page 2919 - Week 11 - Thursday, 22 October 1992
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MR KAINE: They are Mr Willmot's notes. There was ample opportunity, as I have said, to correct the matter. Although they were advised that they misled the house, neither Mr Wood nor Ms Follett made any attempt to do so, and they have never attempted to do it until this day - right up until now. In fact, they still defend their position. Mr Wood and Ms Follett were already agreed that the public total cost would be $600,000 and that the Education Department would secretly bear an additional $200,000 in costs that would be hidden.
The ambit claim argument used by Mr Wood this morning does not hold. There is no evidence in any of the documentation to suggest that either Mr Wood or Ms Follett believed that the $200,000 to be met from the education budget would not be fully expended. After the event maybe it was not; but, at the time, they did not know that and they made a budgetary provision for it. The ambit claim, Madam Speaker, is a convenient wisdom of hindsight.
The important issues here are not the cost at the end of the day for reopening the schools and not whether the estimates were an attempt by the public service to increase their budget. These are simply red herrings to put the blame onto somebody else. The issues are that Mr Wood and Ms Follett knew that the estimated cost of reopening those schools was closer to $900,000 than $600,000, and they artificially reduced the cost to what they perceived to be a publicly acceptable figure by hiding $200,000 in the education budget and deliberately creating a false impression of the costs in the minds of members of this Assembly and, more importantly, in the minds of the community.
Mr Wood was informed, as I said before and as the document I have tabled shows, that legal opinion was that the Chief Minister's statement to the Assembly on 21 June 1991 was misleading and that a correction was required, but it elicited no response. There was a continuation of the cover-up, a continuation of the misinformation campaign. No correction was made in the house or in public, either by Ms Follett or by Mr Wood.
The conclusion, Madam Speaker, can only be that the Ministers both knowingly misled the Assembly and deliberately fostered a misconception about what the costs of reopening those two schools were. Even today they have continued to defend the indefensible and, Madam Speaker, they continue to mislead this house on the true costs. Their actions are contemptuous of the house; they are contemptuous of the community. They reflect an intention not to be accountable to this Assembly or to anybody else. The Ministers deserve censure.
Mr Lamont: Pursuant to standing orders, Madam Speaker, I ask that Mr Kaine table the document, of which the tabled document formed part, which he was quoting from - all of the document.
Mr Kaine: Which document do you want?
Mr Lamont: The document that this obviously formed part of and that you were quoting from.
Mr Kaine: I have only copies of an extract from his notes. That is all I have.
Mr Lamont: I am sorry. This was part of a document, Mr Kaine, that you pulled to pieces.
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