Page 2936 - Week 11 - Thursday, 22 October 1992
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MR WOOD: Madam Speaker, I will go on. There was no official departmental approach for legal advice. I am not sure what steps Dr Willmot took. It may have been on a written brief or a verbal brief. I will certainly have a look and see whether there was any cost attached to it and whether the department paid for something.
Given the facts that I have announced about his attitude to these things, I do not expect that any legal advice to him, whether verbal or written, would be any different. We have sat in this chamber in relation to numbers of matters - for example, whether a government's money Bill can be amended in private members legislation - and we can get as many legal advices as we go to solicitors or barristers. You well know that you can go to your solicitor and you can get the advice you want. I do not know whether that advice has any status at all. I do not know what the brief was. I do not know the nature of the brief or what the approach was - and you want to run an argument about this.
The further thing that I might say is that the department has turned its files upside down. Since this matter was raised by the Canberra Times yesterday, they have been looking for any letter of this nature, and it has not surfaced. I do not know where this came from. We can locate nothing. As I said here, I think in question time yesterday or in my ministerial statement today, I certainly had a conversation with Dr Willmot about these matters and he was as wrong in his interpretation of allegedly misleading the house as he was in a whole range of those other things. He was too passionately involved in it. I told him that. I told him that his advice was not soundly based and there was no argument at all that either I or the Chief Minister misled the house. I heard his advice and I rejected it.
Debate interrupted.
ADJOURNMENT
MADAM SPEAKER: Order! It being 4.30 pm, I propose the question:
That the Assembly do now adjourn.
Ms Follett: I require the question to be put forthwith without debate.
Question resolved in the negative.
CHIEF MINISTER AND MINISTER FOR EDUCATION AND TRAINING
Motion of Censure
Debate resumed.
MR CORNWELL (4.31): Madam Speaker, let me reiterate once again that this motion of censure against the Chief Minister and, as it so happens, the Minister for Education is not about Cook and Lyons schools, their closure, their reopening or, indeed, the costs involved. What it is about is the integrity of this Government, their honesty in producing funding through the budget mechanism and their attempts to mislead not only this house but also the public on the matter of costs relating, as it so happens, to two schools. It could have been a matter that affected transport. It could have been hospitals. It possibly is hospitals; I do not know. It could have been any area of policy, Madam Speaker.
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