Page 554 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 April 1994
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Members of this place who are not members of the Government for the most part have little or no role in the conduct of executive government of this Territory; but there are two exceptions to that concept that we have no right to interfere. Those exceptions are, first of all, the right to ask questions and, secondly, the right to receive truthful answers. It is the argument of the Liberal Opposition in this place today that Mr Berry has deliberately or recklessly misled the Assembly concerning important information about the VITAB deal.
This issue has been pursued by the Liberal Opposition for some months. It is impossible to argue that this issue has crept up on the Government unawares. It has been on notice since at least November of last year that there are serious questions about this arrangement which need to be answered in a public sense. It astonishes me that as late as a few weeks ago the Government remained in its bunker on this issue and was unwilling to concede that there was any problem, any question, concerning the VITAB deal. As a result of enormous pressure from this Opposition, I might point out, and this Opposition alone, almost, that inquiry that Ms Follett referred to was finally commissioned. It took some generating.
The issue that we have been pursuing has given Mr Berry many opportunities to turn back and to ask himself and, moreover, to ask his advisers and to ask ACTTAB about the nature and the source of information that he in turn has supplied to this place. I wonder, Madam Speaker, whether Mr Berry has asked himself and his advisers and his TAB enough questions about that kind of thing. Mr De Domenico and Mrs Carnell have argued that there has been a case of deliberate or reckless misleading of the Assembly. It is the case, and has been the case in this place in the past, that inadvertent misleading of the Assembly, accidentally, unintentionally supplying information which was untrue, is not a hanging offence. The converse of this is quite clear; that where a Minister knows that information is untrue, or has an opportunity, or should have an opportunity, to check information which is put before this place, and should have discovered that it was untrue, the obligation on him is to correct it, to withdraw it, if it is not true, and not to go down to his bunker and say, "I refuse to be engaged on this subject; I refuse to correct what I have said; I refuse to make the record clear". Madam Speaker, we believe that in this case there has been more than inadvertent misleading of this place. There has been a persistent misstatement of the facts to the point where it can be said that Mr Berry was deliberately misleading or that he made statements reckless as to whether they were the truth or were not the truth.
I want to comment on Ms Follett's assertion that this motion should not proceed today because it cuts across the inquiry being conducted by Professor Dennis Pearce. First of all, Madam Speaker, it is clear from the terms of reference that were read out by Ms Follett before that Professor Pearce's inquiry is an inquiry generally into the conduct of the VITAB deal, the circumstances of its formulation and the impact that it will have on the ACT. It is not an inquiry - at least not directly or expressly - into the Minister's statements in this house. The Chief Minister, when she announced the inquiry back in March, said - and I am quoting here from a paragraph in the Canberra Times - "The inquiry does not question Mr Berry's competence". So it is not an inquiry into Mr Berry's competence.
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